Check a document for compatibility

Office for Mac checks a document's compatibility with other versions of Office for Mac and Windows versions of Office and creates a Compatibility Report. You can open the Compatibility Report to learn more about any compatibility issues and try to fix them. You can also ignore the Compatibility Report if you don't plan to share the document with other people or you plan to share the document with people who are using the same version of Office for Mac.

Note: The Compatibility Report checks for compatibility issues with Office 98 for Mac through Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 and with Windows versions from Office 97 through the Microsoft Office 2010.

Do any of the following:

Check a document when you save

1. Create or open the document that you want to check.

2. On the File menu, click Save As.

3. Click Compatibility Report and if you receive a message that you have at least one compatibility issue, click OK to look at the issues. Otherwise, click OK to close the compatibility check.

   If there are compatibility issues, the Compatibility Report pane opens.

4. In the Compatibility Report pane, on the Check compatibility with pop-up menu, click the version of Office that the document might be opened in, and then do one of the following:

If you want to	Do this
Try to fix the Compatibility Report issue	Under Results, click an issue, and then click Fix.
Learn more about the Compatibility Report issue	Under Results, click an issue, and then click Help.
Ignore the Compatibility Report issue	Under Results, click an issue, and then click Ignore.

Check a document at any time

1. Create or open the document that you want to check.

2. On the View menu, click Compatibility Report.

3. On the Check compatibility with pop-up menu, click the version of Office that the document might be opened in.

4. Click Check Document or Recheck Document.

5. Do one of the following:

If there are	Do this
No compatibility issues	Close the Compatibility Report.
Issues listed in the Compatibility Report and you want to try to fix them	Under Results, click an issue, and then click Fix.
Issues listed in the Compatibility Report and you want to learn more about them	Under Results, click an issue, and then click Help.
Issues listed in the Compatibility Report and you want to ignore them	Under Results, click an issue, and then click Ignore.

See also

Sharing documents with other versions of Office

Save a file in Office for Mac