I need to set Excel 2003 as default

[NA5KAR]

Hello All. Thanks in advance for any help you can share. Brand new to this forum. I'll get right into it... I have Windows 7 on my Dell Laptop. I have (and use exclusively) Excel 2003. It came with Office 2003. I have Go Daddy for URL's and Email. They said that I need to update my Outlook (2007) in order for it to work with changes they are making today. I purchased (online) Office 2013, which Go Daddy said will work with their changes. Outlook 2013 works ok. Part of the Office 2013 is Excel 2013. I don't want to use that. When I installed Office 2013, all of the Excel icons on my Home Screen changed to Excel 2013. Excel 2013 is also (now) the default program for all of my .xls files.

I went into the Control Panel to set all of the .xls files to be opened with Excel 2003. However, it does not show up, and even when I Browse for it, I cannot find it. I right clicked on the icon for Excel 2003 in the Program pop up from the Start button, and saw this as the location ... C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Microsoft Office . The extension for Excel 2003 is 'Shortcut'.

Bottom line is, I don't know how to find where the program lives so I can set all of my files to open with it. Any thoughts? Thanks a million.

Dan

 

[townsbg]

I read that 2013 doesn't play well with older versions whereas 2016 is more tolerant. I don't know why and I can't find that now. You can only use the 32 bit version of office 2013. See this: Use Office 2013 on a computer that's running another version of Office - Office | Microsoft Docs You might try to clean up from 2013. Remove Office 2013 or Office 365 Completely with Fix It Released by Microsoft Then I would suggest reinstalling 2003 unfortunately 2003 requires full activation before use and I don't know if you can activate it anymore. Try this: Make excel 2003 default to open files

 

[siliconbeaver]

you can try to install 2013 first, install 2003 second.

I had a similar issue (Office97 and 2010) and prefer Office97 as default. It's fixed in a way, install 2010 first. Office97 second. (I guess 2nd install over-writes "default". hence becomes new default).

 

[townsbg]

That page says to install the older version first.