If it is as big an anoyance to you, the reader, as it is to me, the writer, then you will find this information useful.
The problem starts when you grab an attachment from someone that has Office 2007 and they have not saved the file as a doc format but rather the default for Office 2007, docx. Microsoft has paid good money to keep proprietary formats their own and make it as hard as they can for a 3rd party to support their formats, by leveraging the market share they have with thier office suite it keeps the ball rolling in thier court. Most people do not know that there are other ways to get around this and good thing for us there are open source, free alternatives, that will help us in our goal to become unchained from the bindings of the docx format.
Show me to tools!
The first tool that you could use would be “Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats” but this can create a problem if you currently do not have office 2003 installed, which then would still leave you with a file that could not be opened. If Office 2003 is installed the program will update Office 2003 with the proper files to handle the new docx file extension.
Secondly you could use an online service such as Zamzar just by going to the site, uploading the file, letting it do it’s work, then downloading the file back to the computer. While this might be easy for small files it will become very ineffecient with something like an entire book, encyclopedia, or any other large file.
Lastly I will turn back to OpenOffice for the solution, as of OpenOffice 3.0 support for Microsoft’s new file formats has been added and OpenOffice can now open a docx, or any other Office 2007 file and save it into another format.
To convert from Office 2007 to Office 2003 all you have to do open the file using OpenOffice then just save the file as a doc file, using file —> save as.
It’s just that simple! If you can think of a reason to not like OpenOffice I am sure that it will be few and far between. For this example it can be so much easier as you will also have a complete office suite for no cost that can offer enhanced inter-operability that even Microsoft can’t deliver.
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