Microsoft's office suite is a staple of the office, even before Windows came along. Taking this into account, we all agree that a considerably long road has been traveled and the number of versions that Office has is quite large. It is not surprising that we find an old document and when we open it in a new version of Word we have some compatibility problem, but it is easy to get out of this mode ..
What is compatibility mode in Microsoft Word?
When we open a document and see that the compatibility mode appears in the title bar. This means that it is very possible that the document in question was created in an earlier version of the suite or using an older format. For security, Word opens the file in compatibility mode.
Obviously, newer versions of Word add new features that can corrupt the integrity of documents saved in earlier versions. The compatibility mode is responsible for disabling the functions to be able to see and edit the file as it was in its original version..
To serve as an example, edit a document in Word 2010, we will not be able to add a video, the function did not exist in 2010.
Check compatibility with previous versions
It's easy to check which versions of Word are compatible with using the Word Compatibility Checker. This is only available to users who are using a modern version of Office..
The first thing we will do is click on File in the upper left part of the screen, then we will have to go to Check problems and Check compatibility.
Here we are going to press the drop-down menu to select the versions that we can display. The version with a blue check mark is the latest version of Word with which the document is 100% compatible.
Turn off compatibility mode
It is possible to disable compatibility mode to access all the available functions, although we must bear in mind that this could make our document look too different from what it originally did.
The first thing we will do is open the Word document, we will go to File and then Save As.
In the Save As window we will have to choose Word Document (.docx) from the drop-down menu, just below the name. In previous versions, the menu will be Format.
To finish, we are going to click on Save and in this way we have managed to convert the old document into a current one, for which we deactivate the compatibility mode.
Another option that we have to convert an old version of a document into a more modern one is to go to File> Information> Convert. This will convert the document to a new version and enable new features.