Excel file with macros saved in 2007 crashes when opened in 2003

Question

My team keeps a large Excel file on a SharePoint server. Recently I've edited this file with Excel 2007 and saved it. Afterwards, everyone who opened the file with Excel 2003 and chose to "Enable Macros" experienced a crash. Disabling macros allows the file to be opened.

Can someone give me some clue why this is happening? Thanks.

Incidentally,

Unhandled exception at 0x301b8b74 in EXCEL.EXE: 0xC0000005: Access violation reading location 0x00000000.

Answer 1

The file had a reference to the Microsoft Word 11.0 Object Library. When I saved it in 2007 the reference was automatically converted to Microsoft Word 12.0 Object Library, which is missing in 2003 installations and hence causes a null pointer.