If you ever get into a situation whereby you need to open/view an Excel 2007 file (.xlsx) but the computer you are using does not have Excel 2007 installed then these tricks could come in handy. This was particularly very helpful to me when I was checking my email from my friends computer and I received an Excel 2007 file as attachment that I wanted to view immediately but my friend’s computer didn’t have Office 2007 installed.
Option 1
If the computer you are using has Excel 2003 installed then you are in luck. You can just download and install the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack which automatically converts the excel 2007 file and let you open, edit and save workbooks using Excel 2003.
Option 2
What if you don’t have Excel 2003 installed on the computer? Well you can download and install the Excel viewer from Microsoft which lets you open, view, and print Excel workbooks, even if you don’t have Excel installed
Option 3
You can use Open Office to view the excel files. OpenOffice.org is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more.
The same trick can be applied to Microsoft Word 2007 files too. Do you know of any other ways to do this?
thanks for this tip. it is very useful
Perfect! I’ve been searching online for hours trying to find a solution for this for an urgent deadline (tomorrow – argh!). Thanks for sharing the tip, appreciated.
Aww my clients used to send us .docx file (office 2007) while we are using office 2003 and we faced this problem last year. I got a plugin which automatically make it readable and seems it is similar to Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack.
Now that’s a neat trick. Some of my not so computer literate friends are still using Office 2003 and have trouble opening files which is in Office 2007 format. This is the ideal trick for them. Thanks
@Marty, You need to get a Mac version of Excel or MS office.
http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/Excel2008/default.mspx
I just purchased an Apple computer, how can I intall excel?
The problem that I have is with Excel 2007 pivot tables created from analysis services cube data. Although you can view them via the compatibility option, if you want /need to do drill down then I have found it impossible to do so even when the original spreadsheet was saved as a 97-2003 document!
It help a lot.
Thanks