Excel 2007 removes comments from 2013 saved files

Hi Richard and Bill.

I have found this article to be helpful in an issue encountered at my workplace.

I found the issue was due to the version of 2007 being installed on some machines was missing SP3.

After installing SP3 it was possible to open excel workbooks created in 2013 with comments without any issues.

Thanks

David

I don't have a clue why Excel 2013 created XML that 2007 could not read.  I would not expect that to happen and I would be equally annoyed if it had happened to me.

If you still have a copy of the workbook in the state which failed to load in 2007, I would suggest sending it to Microsoft as a support incident.  I am fairly certain that they would treat the generation of content by 2013 that was unreadable by 2007 as a bug and would want to investigate and fix it.

I would, however, like to make 2 observations based on many years of experience:

a) If you are creating an Excel workbook that is to be used in different versions of Excel you should always do the development in the earliest version with which it will be used, to avoid potential backwards compatibility problems

b) For a major piece of work like this you should always have a good backup strategy so that if the workbook suffers a significant failure you can retrieve a previous state easily.

Hopefully you do have a backup even if it is a bit old.

You should be able, in 2007, to copy the cells from the worksheets in the backup file and paste special > comments into the version that has currently lost its comments.

hi.. i have faced same problem.. how to fix it?

Open the same file Excel 2013 and Save as "Excel 97-2003" instead of regular xlsx format. This should fix it however the size of the file would increase.

I had checked a few things and alrady started finishing this project with Excel 2013.  I have about 28 backup files.  Ones such as "Calculations_2007.xlsm".

I will keep working on this project and at the end will open the workbook backup in 2007 and see if the comments get removed again.

Just to be clear; the comments don't disapear in Excel 2013.  The comments are still there.  This isn't an issue with this project as I am able to create a blank Excel file in 2013, add one comment, and then save as test.xlsx to the desktop.  When I open it with Excel 2007; Excel repairs the Excel file and removes the comments.

I will try doing a few updates as well to see if things imporve.

hi.. i have same problem. please give me solution..