You upgraded to a new version of Excel, and you need to share workbooks with people who didn't upgrade yet. Running the Compatibility Checker helps you identify features or information that might not be available in an earlier version. You can resolve some of those issues before you share your workbook.
Save a file to .xls format and review Compatibility Checker issues
Follow these steps:
Select File > Export > Change File Type.
Under Workbook File Types, select a workbook file type.
In the Save As popup window, choose a folder location for the workbook.
In the File name box, type a new file name or use the existing name.
Select Save.
Run the Compatibility Checker for Excel
To verify that a workbook is compatible, run the Compatibility Checker manually the first time you save your workbook. Then set the Compatibility Checker to run automatically every time you save that workbook.
Follow these steps:
Select File > Info > Check for Issues.
Choose Check Compatibility.
To check for compatibility automatically from now on, select the Check compatibility when saving this workbook box.
Tip
You can also specify the versions of Excel that you want to include when you check for compatibility. All versions are checked by default, so just uncheck the versions you don't want to include.
If the checker finds any issues, the Find link takes you to that place in your worksheet, and the Help link takes you to information on the issue and possible solutions.
Use Access to combine data sources for Data Features that use multiple tables
Note
You can also use the VLOOKUP function in Excel to address this issue, but the process is somewhat complicated, and becomes more complicated as the number of data sources to combine increases.
Earlier versions, like Excel 2019, don't support data features that analyze multiple tables, because those versions don't have a Data Model. If your workbook contains any such features, you might be able to prepare them for use in earlier versions by combining the feature's data sources into a single table and then using that new table as the data source.
One way to do this task is to use Access to combine the data sources and reproduce them as a query, which you can then import into your workbook. The process goes like this:
- In Access, import each original data source as a new table.
- In Excel, open the Relationships dialog box by clicking Data > Data Tools > Relationships and note the relationships between the original data sources.
- In Access, recreate each of the relationships.
- In Access, create a query that contains all the fields your Excel data feature needs.
- In Excel, import the query into a new worksheet as a table.
Once your data is in one table in Excel, choose that table as the data source for the data features that were using multiple tables, or recreate the data features and choose the new table as their data source.
Need more help?
You can always ask an expert in the Excel Tech Community or get support in Communities.
See also
Excel formatting and features that aren't transferred to other file formats