If I create a Word document or Excel sheet in Vista, can I re-open it and work with it in XP?

Answer 1

The answer is Maybe.

Let's first clarify a few things. Vista and XP are operating systems. XP was introduced originally in 2002 (I believe) and upgraded markedly with Service Pack 2 about 3 years ago. Vista was introduced in 2007.

The programs Excel and Word are application software. Recent editions came out in 2000, 2003, and 2007.

Your XP machine may have Word and Excel 2007 on it if you upgrade to 2007 versions. If you do this and create a Word 2007 document on the Vista machine, you can read it on the XP machine because both are of the same version of Word.

Also, when you save the Word 2007 document you can use the 'save as' rather than 'save' option. When you do the 'save as' you can select saving the document as a previous version of Word (e.g. Word 2003 instead of Word 2007 if you wish) and this enables you to read it on a Word 2003 machine. However, some features in Word 2007 are not in Word 2003 and these will be lost if you save it as an older version. You can do the same in Excel - and will lose features of the newer Excel when you save as an older version.

For basic users, the new version features may not be used so saving as an older version may do no harm and not be a loss of any used features because no advanced features are lost.

Answer 2

Provided that you have Word or Excel installed on the XP system, then yes.

If the documents were created using Office-2007 then you can get a free Office-2007 reader download from MS if you are using an older version of Office on the XP system.

Answer 3

If you are using Office 2007 products with Vista and have an earlier Office product (such as Office 2003) on your XP machine, you can save it in a retrograded version (Save As and choose an earlier version in the droplist at the bottom).

However, you can also install the compatibility pack on the XP machine. The links below gives you information and a link to the download from Microsoft.

Hopefully this will resolve your problem

Answer 4

Its the version of MS Office that counts.

If you save a document or sheet in MS Office 2007, you might not be able to open it in MS Office 2003. You would have to save it 2003 format for it to be backword compatible.

XP or Vista do not matter in this.

Answer 5

If by vista you mean office 2007, then be sure to save as 2003 version file or whatever.

Answer 6

Word and Excel work on all Windows OSes.

The M$-Office version must be compatible on both machines.

Try it and see if it works.

Answer 7

Yes

Answer 8

Of course, if you have the same version of those programs.

Vista does not effect file types in any way for those kinds of files.
Even Mac doesn't use different file types for ppt(x) or doc(x) files...