Old .doc, .xls and .ppt files now open in full, all the way back to Word for DOS

Until 1.29.5, Rutba Office read an old .doc, .xls or .ppt as text. The window said it was an approximation, and it was: the words were there and most of what made the file look the way it did was not. Earlier posts in this series listed the old formats as a gap, and they were right to.

Old files are where a lot of businesses keep their history. A lease signed in 2004, or a price list template nobody has touched since it was made. 1.29.5 opens them in full, and 1.29.6 opens the ones somebody protected with a password.

Word documents, back to Word 1.0

Documents opens files from Word 97 to 2003, Word 6.0 and 95, Word 2.0 and 1.0, Windows Write and Word for DOS. Each keeps its paragraphs and styles, the look of its characters in the document’s own code page, lists, tables, links, footnotes, headers and footers, and pictures. Floating pictures, text boxes and shapes stay where Word put them, laid out by the layout rules Word kept in the file. When you save, the document is written as a .docx.

Excel workbooks, back to Excel 2.1

Worksheets opens workbooks from Excel 2.1 to 2003. Values and formulas come in with their last results, along with names and number formats. Fonts, fills and borders come in the exact colours later versions of Excel use for them. So do rich text, merged cells, frozen panes, column widths and row heights, hyperlinks, notes and pictures.

Charts keep their kind, stacking, axes, labels, legends and colours. Tables keep their style and totals row, and conditional formats keep their colour scales, data bars, icon sets and Excel 97’s rules with their formatting. A workbook is saved as an .xlsx.

PowerPoint 97 to 2003

Presentations opens decks from PowerPoint 97 to 2003 with each slide’s background, its shapes in their fills, gradients, outlines and shadows with their words, pictures, lines and tables. The notes come too, along with a slide hidden from the show, its transition and its shapes’ effects.

There is one case worth knowing about. A .ppt or .xls saved by Office 2007 or later carries a copy of the newer description inside it: the theme, the slide master and its layouts, and every shape as it was drawn. That copy is what Rutba Office opens, so such a deck comes in on its own layouts with real placeholders. Where an older Office has changed a drawing since, the change is read from the older records.

Old files with a password

Since 1.29.6 a Word, Excel or PowerPoint 97 to 2003 file protected with a password opens once you give it the password. Three schemes are read: RC4 CryptoAPI as Office 2003 onwards wrote it, the older RC4 of Office 97 and 2000, and the obfuscation Excel 5.0 and 95 used.

OpenDocument, Rich Text and web pages, whole

The same few days did the same for the open formats. Since 1.29.6 an .odt opens and saves with its headings, the look of its words, links, lists at their levels, tables with merged cells, pictures, notes, headers and footers. Until then Documents opened an .odt as plain paragraphs and saved it the same way, which lost all of that. Our post on writing OpenDocument did not say so, and now carries a correction.

• OpenDocument presentations open as they were made (1.29.4): slides at their own size, with text boxes, pictures, shapes, lines and tables where they stood, and the notes.
• OpenDocument spreadsheets keep column widths, hidden rows and columns and frozen panes (1.29.4), and their charts, shapes and pictures going in and out (1.29.6). A stacked chart stays stacked.
• Rich Text and web pages open as documents (1.29.6), and a document saved as Rich Text, HTML or plain text keeps its headings, list numbers, tables and pictures.

Converted on your own computer

An online converter will turn an old file into a new one too, but it does that by uploading your file to a server you know nothing about. For a contract or a medical letter, that is a bad trade. Rutba Office reads the file where it is, and nothing about it leaves the machine.

Keep the original beside the converted copy, whatever you open it with. A conversion can lose something the original still has, and the things old files most often get wrong are numbered lists, page breaks, tables that ran across pages, and charts. How to open an old .doc, .xls or .ppt file covers the other ways to do it, Microsoft Office’s File Block settings among them.