A lot of businesses still use earlier versions of Excel than 2007. If you find that you need to issue of share workbooks with such earlier versions then it is a good idea to run the Compatibility Checker, so there are no compatibility issues or loss of functionality of the user has earlier versions of Excel.

Compatibility Checker will find any potential issues and helps you create a report so you can resolve them.

In Excel, open the workbook you want to check for compatibility, then hit the File Tab. In the Prepare For Sharing Area hit Check For Issues the Check Compatibility Option.

A dialog box appears where Excel will tell you if there are issues and what they are.

As you can see there are only some minor issues with formatting in my Excel 2010 worksheet in the above example that would affect any earlier versions of Excel.

If there were some major issues with significant functionality then Excel would look something like below.

Prior warning of these type of issues is great when you need to issue Excel workbooks to users of Earlier versions of Excel. Handy isn’t it????