Microsoft Office 2000/Visual Basic Programmer's Guide

Opening Signed Documents in Office 97

Word 2000, Excel 2000, and PowerPoint 2000 documents share the same file formats as the corresponding Office 97 applications, so documents produced with Office 2000 applications can be opened in Office 97 without conversion. Digitally signed documents from Office 2000 can be opened in their corresponding Office 97 applications and most VBA code will be run; however, to protect the digital signature, the VBA project will be locked. There is no way to override or provide a password for this lock in an Office 97 application. To view or modify the VBA code in a digitally signed document, it must be opened in the corresponding Office 2000 application.

While most VBA code will run under Office 97, code that uses Office 2000-specific VBA properties, methods, objects, and keywords will not run — not due to digital-signing features, but simply because new VBA features aren't supported by previous versions of VBA.