Determine whether a PowerPoint 2007 presentation is compatible with earlier versions of PowerPoint

Important: Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 does not support saving to PowerPoint 95 or earlier file formats.

To ensure that you can open your Office PowerPoint 2007 presentation in an earlier version of PowerPoint, and to minimize significant losses of functionality and fidelity, you can run the Compatibility Checker in Office PowerPoint 2007. The Compatibility Checker finds potential compatibility issues between Office PowerPoint 2007 and earlier versions of PowerPoint, and creates a report to help you resolve any issues.

As an example of a loss of functionality that can occur, some of the new shape effects in Office PowerPoint 2007 (such as reflection and glow) appear as pictures in earlier versions of PowerPoint. For more information about other Office PowerPoint 2007 features and elements that can change, see Features that change or are lost when you open a PowerPoint 2007 presentation in an earlier version of PowerPoint.

Important: When you work on a presentation in compatibility mode, where the presentation is in PowerPoint 97-2003 file format instead of the new Office PowerPoint 2007 file format (.pptx), the Compatibility Checker runs automatically when you save your presentation.

To run the Compatibility Checker, do the following:

1. In Office PowerPoint 2007, open the presentation that you want to check for compatibility.

2. Click the Microsoft Office Button , point to Prepare, and then click Run Compatibility Checker.

   To check your presentation for compatibility every time that you save it in a PowerPoint 97-2003 format, in the Microsoft Office PowerPoint Compatibility Checker dialog box, select the Check compatibility when saving in PowerPoint 97-2003 formats check box.

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