Compatibility Pack for pre-2007 Office not working in Win10 for xlsx

Being cheap and "if it ain' t broke, don't fix it" I'm using my Office 2000 on my Windows 10 machine. Just as I've been using it for almost 20 years, in multiple operating systems.

When Office 2007 came out, and the docx and xlsx formats, Windows provided a "Compatibility Pack" to allow older versions of the Office software to open the new file formats.

I downloaded that onto the Windows 10 machine, ran it, and it works fine for docx files - Word 2000 can open, read, edit, save them.

But not so for xlsx files with Excel 2000.

A lot of these compatibility packs, maybe all, are gone from the web. I transferred to my Win10 machine from my Win7 machine the FileConverters.exe (version 12.0.6514.5001) that worked great in Windows 7 and ran it. But still, no fix. And I can, using that same version, use Excel 2000 on xlsx files in Windows 7.

Is there some Windows 10 trick I need to do, to enable Excel 2000 to work for me, as it does in Windows 7?

Hi folks

open in WPS Office (Free) and then save as .xls if you still want to use pre-office 2007 stuff.

It's much more compatible than Libre Office too.

WPS Office Perfect Compatible With Microsoft (MS) (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) For PC and Mobile - Free Download

Cheers
jimbo

Okay, progress, sort of, but not there yet.

Running filetypeconverters.exe creates a "moc.exe" file in the "Office 12" folder.

Associating the moc.exe program to open up .xlsx files is supposed to do the trick. See How to fix How-tos

In Windows 7 and prior Windows versions, this works fine. The .xlsx file opens in Excel 2000, after the XML converter does its magic.

However, in Windows 10, the moc.exe seemingly can only convert the file to .xls format and save it somewhere.

So instead of double-clicking and opening, one has to double-click, designate where to save the file as a .xls file, then find that file and manually open it.

Not sure why in Win10 these extra manual steps are necessary, when in prior versions, the flow was seamless.