Recently I blogged about easing the transition to Excel 2007 from Excel 2003, by changing your PivotTable design and options.

This post is going to be about creating PivotTables that connect to OLAP cubes (and PivotTables in general) that will work in either client, or sometimes called “Compatibility Mode“

If you create a PivotTable in Excel 2007 (a “Version 12″ PivotTable) and save the xlsx file to an xls (Excel 2003 or “Version 10″ PivotTable), you can still open the spreadsheet in Excel 2003, but you cannot refresh the data – it will still work if you open the .xls in 2007 though.

What that means is that the version 12 PivotTables will not downgrade to version 10 PivotTables and won’t be refreshable in Excel 2003. This presents a problem if you still have people you want to share the PivotTable with that are using Excel 2003, and you are using Excel 2007. What you need to do is create the PivotTables as version 10 PivotTables, but from Excel 2007, and this is how you do that.

The easiest way to create the version 10 PT in Excel 2007 is create it in compatibility mode. To do that, open a new Excel 2007 workbook and save it as Excel 97-2003. Open that file in Excel 2007 again and you will be in compatibility mode. Once you create a PivotTable and save it, you can then share it with anyone that just has Excel 2003 and they can open it and refresh it. Simple, huh?