

The software programmers aren’t sure what version of Office you will be using, so they err on the safe side, and have the export default to Compatibility Mode.Īnother possibility: you are opening an old document.

So if you are using Office 365, and your friend is running Office 2010, you could send this Compatibility Mode document to them and rest assured it will look the same to them as it does to you.įor this reason, you will often see data that is exported from other programs Reporting Services and WSU Reporting, for instance default to Compatibility Mode. Its purpose is to make a document as functional as possible with older versions of software.

The intentions of Compatibility Mode are in the right place. Let’s talk about this setting, and how to escape from it, in your Microsoft Office documents. This is not just an Excel issue… sometimes this happens Word or PowerPoint: certain features are mysteriously faded in the user’s ribbon. This happens frequently after a PivotTables session… An attendee excitedly returns to their computer to create a PivotTable from an existing Excel file, only to discover that the PivotTable screen looks a lot different than it did in class, and a lot of their favorite features are grayed out in the ribbon.
