Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
So you've got Microsoft Excel 2007 installed and you're ready to start using it. Let's
go open up an old worksheet that we've used in past versions of Microsoft Excel. We'll
click on the Microsoft Office button up in the top, left-hand corner, and select the
Open file. This cash flow budget worksheet was something
that I have used previously, and I want to start a brand-new one for
brand-new year. So I select it, and I click the Open button. And I get this
message. Whenever you see a message with a yield sign and an exclamation mark, that's
telling you there's a warning. It's telling you that there's
something about what you're trying to do that you need to think about
before you proceed. In this case, it's telling me that I'm working with an earlier beta version
of Microsoft Excel 2007. And it's also telling me that it's going to
convert the workbook to this most recent version of the file format, when I save it.
So, for those of you that have been using Microsoft Excel in the past, and you are opening
up older versions--let's say an Excel 2003 worksheet--it's going to identify
for you, that it's going to bring it in, what we're going to call, compatibility mode.
Where it may turn off some of the features that didn't work in 2007, just so that you
can easily work with the information in the spreadsheet that that you're working in
here. It's also verifying that the information that you're opening up, is from a
trusted source, so that you're not going to corrupt your environment.
So let's click on OK, and see what happens. And I get this nice Cash Flow Budget Worksheet
in front of me. If I take a look at the top of the screen where I see what worksheet
I'm working in, I have a little identifier here in square brackets,
and that's called compatibility mode. And that's identifying for me that this is an
older version of a spreadsheet that I had worked with previously, and that it's
now putting it in a safe mode for me to work in, in 2007. And that all of the
functionality in 2007 may not be available for me, but
that's fine. At least it lets me work. And it will also
allow me to save this document in a mode that would let me share it with those people
that haven't already upgraded to Microsoft 2007. Especially the Excel version of it.
One thing I want to mention to you is you don't have the ability to manually turn off
this compatibility mode feature in 2007, it automatically will show up for you, but
you cannot turn it off if you don't want to. This is something that is standard
and it's predetermined by the application itself. Now that we've seen that we can use
older versions of the software in the worksheets in Microsoft 2007 XL, let's go
and create one from scratch.