Restore Support for Old Files Formats in Office 2003 SP3

Back in September, Microsoft released Office 2003 SP3 – a service pack that blocked certain file formats because they were considered unsafe.

For instance, if you have Office 2003 SP3 on your system, you many not be able to open or save files that were created in older versions of Word, Excel or PowerPoint.

While this is old news, it picked steam recently because Corel Draw files are also blocked in Office 2003  and Corel is naturally not happy about it.

If you are are affected, you can easily enable support for old file formats in Office 2003 without uninstalling SP3. All you have to do is execute this small registry file (safe) and all your old document archives will open just fine in Office 2003. 

To check the version of Office 2003 installed on your system, see the file properties of WinWord.exe – if it’s 11.0.8169.0, you have SP3 already. Apply the above registry update and access to old files will be restored.