Chinese excel documents

[Sleuth]

Anyone know why my US Dell with a 2 year old version of Microsoft Excel would not recognize an excel document from a Chinese version of Office 2007? The Chinese version--I believe--was purchased from Dell China.
When I try to open the document I get "Unable to Invoke Program", whatever that means. Also, my excel documnets are .xls, this one of the Chinese version is .xlsx.
F

[PDLM]

Well, fairly obviously, because Office 2007 in native file format isn't backwards compatible to Office 2003 (or whatever you have). You need to get the person with Office 2007 to do a "Save As" on the file and save it back into an older format. This may of course result in some loss of functionality if they have used fancy features only available in Office 2007.

[Sleuth]

Stupid Microsoft.

[MrMoo]

Stupid Microsoft.

Why? Its been their method of forcing pointless Office upgrades for at least the ten years. It's a clever vendor lock in ploy. Why else would you upgrade?

To answer the OP, Microsoft released 2007 document compatible add-ins for Office 97, XP, and 2003:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...displaylang=en

Much like opening docs in Mac Office, or OpenOffice there will be issues though.

[Sleuth]

[QUOTE=MrMoo;182948]Why? Its been their method of forcing pointless Office upgrades for at least the ten years. It's a clever vendor lock in ploy. Why else would you upgrade?
[QUOTE]

My company doesn't upgrade. You get to upgrade when you get a new computer so, up to this point, the Microsoft ploy hasn't worked. Now it's just a matter of convincing the corporate bureaucrats I need to upgrade.