Recent CommentsOpening Office 2007 documents in Office 2003 or prior
I had a random thought on my way home today about Microsoft Office 2007. It’s great that Microsoft have adapted the XML format for Office 2007, but it’s not particularly useful when sharing with someone using Office 2003 or prior, who can’t open this new file format. I’ve read previously that the Office 2007 Word Document .docx format file can be opened with a ZIP extraction utility, and the XML file can be read within the file. However this still isn’t particularly useful.
It makes sense for me to start using these new file formats since I’m using Office 2007, but what about people I send the files to? What are they going to do?
Blow and behold, Microsoft have actually released a compatibility pack for Office 2000 onwards, which depending on the exact previous version of Office you have, allows you to open and possibly even save to .docx format.
I shall go install it on my fathers computer before he asks me how to open that .docx file I just sent him!
March 11th, 2008 at 6:23 pm
It is indeed good of Microsoft to consider the broader market beyond its own Office 2007 users. (And they’ve even got a OOXML to ODF converter lying around unless I’m mistaken.) One potentially frustrating issue that I’ve come across, however, is that the Office 2008 (that is, the recently released Mac version) does not support the new maths typesetting of Office 2007; and furthermore, the fallback behaviour leaves much to be desired. The Office 2007 producing documents that won’t render in Office 2008 correctly by default? That’s lining up to be a bit of a headache. (Luckily, not for me!)
March 12th, 2008 at 7:20 pm
Hey Will, good to see you’re keeping on top of these things much more than I.
I hadn’t heard of OOXML or ODF before, so I just Wikipedia’d them. I’d be interested to know on the odd occasion that you’re not saving documents as LaTeX, what file formats you do save in when you’re not concerned about sharing the file with others?