Looking for a genuine compatibility pack for office 2003

I would suggest you download LibreOffice. It's free and mostly compatible with Office (wouldn't like to guarantee 100%).

It will read files people send to you. Can't remember if you can save as .xls files but I suspect you can. I'll need to check.

It will also cope with.Docx files.

What does "don't work properly" mean?

I used the compatibility pack when it first came out, but before long I upgraded to Excel 2007. It took me a little while to get used to the Ribbon but looking at the big picture it's a much richer application. (I still complain that to insert rows or columns you don't go to the Insert panel, but nothing is perfect.)

I am not an expert on compatibility issues with various versions of Excel, but the compatibility pack first came out about about 17 years ago and your version of Excel 20 years ago. That's an eternity in software. I have read that there may be issues trying to use Excel 2003 on Windows 10, although I have not seen details. Even with the compatibility pack, if you try to share files with anyone else there will almost certainly be problems. If you don't like the Ribbon you may want to look at open source alternatives to Office.

Eventually the Ribbon will make sense. Maybe use something like Ubit, which creates a Ribbon tab with the old controls and is free for private use.

https://www.ubit.ch/software/ubitmenu-languages/



Alternatively you might be able to get the file format converter from the archive

https://web.archive.org/web/20130226...Converters.exe

You can find it here https://landscapearchitect.com/excelforum/