Its great to be back blogging again! All this while I was busy with setting up few online businesses and super duper busy with my full time job. More on in the later blog posts.
Problem
Recently we had a lot of trouble sharing Project Schedules with client. Simply put, we are using Project 2010 and the client is using Project 2007. Though we save our project plan in 2007 (or even 2003) format within Project 2010, the client was unable to open .mpp files using Project 2007.
We get the following error message:
This file was created by a newer version of Microsoft Office Project and a converter is needed to open it. Do you want to download the converter from the Microsoft Office Web site?
If you Click on the Yes button, you were taken to Microsoft Page with instructions for fixing Project 2003 compatibility issue. Clearly this is a bug with Microsoft Office Project 2007.
If you Click on the No button, you get another windows asking to install the latest project software! Very good up-selling technique here!!
I got my IT guys install both Project 2007 and Project 2010 on my work laptop and decided to fix this backward compatibility issue between Project 2007 and Project 2010.
A quick look on web showed few other guys having a similar trouble (http://forums.techarena.in/microsoft-project/1321653.htm). I was unable to find a solution straight on the web.
Solution
Finally I got to a solution to fix this issue.
The Project 2007 client you are using should be patched up to SP2.
Download it here: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=8230
Now open the project schedule within Project 2010 and save it as 2007 compatible. If you don’t have Project 2010 ask the one who sent you the project schedule to re-save it as 2007 file and send it back to you.
Open the newer .mpp file in Project 2007 and bob is uncle!
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