Is there a way to use 2019 Excel without OneDrive file conversions to work with earlier Office Excel versions?

Question

We are required to move away from Office 365 and external drives (OneDrive, Dropbox) to internal NAS for security reasons and evaluating Office 2019 with internal NAS.

Things were going well until we found that earlier releases of Office (2010) could not use the 2019 Excel files when saved to NAS. The Title Bar and 5 lines of the the spread sheet are moved under the Menu and Task Bar targets and can't be moved into the workspace. Several damaged engineering worksheets with heavy VB were found blank, but could be opened by using "New Window" page, but then didn't operate.

Further testing shows coping 2019 Excel files onto USB drives and Internal NAS (Synology family) result in the problem. Then testing on Dropbox and Google Drive show the same problem. The only way to fix it is transferring through OneDrive which is excluded by the insurance underwriter.

Our thinking this is a fatal flaw in 365 and 2019 and to drop back to earlier office versions.

Thoughts?

Answer 1

This was an evaluation of Office 2019 with internal NAS for backup and shared files versus OneDrive. A station with Office 2010 had the corrupted 2019 Excel problem.

Microsoft support had us repaired Office 2010, reloaded 2010, reloaded Windows 10 Pro and we still have the corrupted 2019 Excel problem. But everything else is fine.

Now we found going through OneDrive does not necessarily fix the problem all the time.

So we added another Office 2010 station to the evaluation system and found the problem isn't in the new station.

It's isolated it to the original station. We're going to give this another week and if we can't find the problem. decommission the original station.

Answer 2

Hi @Jim Robinson PE ,
Welcome to Q&A forum!

Is there a way to use 2019 Excel without OneDrive file conversions to work with earlier Office Excel versions?

< How did you use the OneDrive file conversion?

Usually, we open earlier versions of Excel files and work in compatibility mode.
For more information, please refer to: Use Excel with earlier versions of Excel.

coping 2019 Excel files onto USB drives and Internal NAS (Synology family) result in the problem.

< Since we do not have a similar test environment, I cannot test further. Thanks for your understanding.

Any misunderstandings and updates, pelase let me know.

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