[PCWorld]

Post your comments for Answer Line: Old vs. new Microsoft Office file formats here

[TsarNikky]

As long as one can "save" files in the non-x format, things will be fine. Since one can never be sure at to which version a recipient has, saving in the "non-x" format is the safest. Who needs the "I couldn't open your file" response to an e-mail, especially if a potential customer?

[LincolnSpector]

Quote

As long as one can "save" files in the non-x format, things will be fine. Since one can never be sure at to which version a recipient has, saving in the "non-x" format is the safest. Who needs the "I couldn't open your file" response to an e-mail, especially if a potential customer?

It depends on who your customers are. Mine are editors of tech publications like PC World. I'm reasonably comfortable assuming that THEY can open a .docx file.

OTOH, my son had at least one professor in college who started the semester informing his students that all of their papers had to be in the .doc format.

[oldnuke69]

Quote

As long as one can "save" files in the non-x format, things will be fine. Since one can never be sure at to which version a recipient has, saving in the "non-x" format is the safest. Who needs the "I couldn't open your file" response to an e-mail, especially if a potential customer?

Outlook 2013 is already dropping import/export support for .doc and .xls formats. It appears that Word, Excel, and Powerpoint won't drop support, but look out for Outlook 201X.

[oldnuke69]

Quote

As long as one can "save" files in the non-x format, things will be fine. Since one can never be sure at to which version a recipient has, saving in the "non-x" format is the safest. Who needs the "I couldn't open your file" response to an e-mail, especially if a potential customer? Outlook 2013 is already dropping import/export support for .doc and .xls formats. It appears that Word, Excel, and Powerpoint won't drop support, but look out for Outlook 201X.

Shout have said "Office 201X"

[MleB]

90% of the folks I communicate with - granted, usually poor, starving arts organizations but a few corporations, too - rely on .doc (or PDF) as their default preference for file communication. I daresay most still rely on pre-Office 2007 for the lion's share of their work. IIABDFI (If It Ain't Broke...) applies here and most would rather have an open running sore than deal with 'the ribbon'.

That said, I know of no one who expects / wants documentation arriving in .pages, either...

[Fatesrider]

As one who works with the "average user" as my actual job, I can say for certain that the conversion to .docx was, without argument, THE most painful and productivity-killing change in computer history. And I'm not even going to go into the "blue ribbon of death".

The whole "save as" concept is utterly lost on MOST people. When Microsoft created the .docx format as their default, it sent shock waves through every business. I can't count the number of clients I had call me and demand to know why they can't open the new file format someone a touch more cutting edge sent them. I can't count the amount of time I explained how to "save as" before Microsoft came out with the conversion add-on.

I don't see that compressing files that are typically under a megabyte to begin with (for pure text files) is in any way advantageous when it cost businesses in the neighborhood of billions in lost productivity and tech support. I'm also not sure about giving kudos to Microsoft for coming out with a translator for backward functionality with previous Office products to fix a format that really wasn't broken in the first place. It seems to me at the time it was either do that, or watch Word Perfect or even Open Office take off because most people didn't get the .docx format. (Not that it would have done a lot of good, of course).

ALL of my Word files are in the older .doc format, but I don't user Word and CAN save in .docx. The point is every program on Earth opens .doc files and with .docx, it's still hit or miss, especially if you haven't installed a translator (taking time and productivity away from those who do that which didn't need to be taken away until the .docx format came out). Virtually everyone in my client list uses .doc instead of .docx format.

The long and short of it is the .docx format was a format that didn't HAVE to happen. Universal standards aside (which .docx isn't), .doc files were pretty much as close to universal standards as any file system out there simply because of its ubiquitous presence and recognizable nature.

[rgeiken]

I have always saved Word documents as .doc. That way I know that anybody that gets one will be able to handle it. I started that with Office 2007, and now have Office 2010. I want to make sure that the file that I send to anyone is universal so they don't have a hassle getting it open. I can remember somebody forwarding me word files from a Mac Computer, and I was difficult get them to open at all without worrying that it would be compatible with my Windows computer. That is what is so nice about .pdf files, they are easy to open not matter what your operating system. I have been opening some of these easily in my Nexus 10.. For me personally, it hasn't seemed to make much difference whether the files is .doc or .docx. I don't use any formatting that would cause a problem.

[RabidWolf]

Once again, every commenter thinks of 'Office' files as Word documents. Pity the millions of poor Excel and Access users. Never a word about those changes.

[brainout]

Older versions of MS Office can in fact read and write the docx etc. files if you download this free File Converter program from Microsoft: http://www.microsoft...tails.aspx?id=3

I only use MS Office 2000-2003, but my clients sometimes use later versions of Word. So I get a lot of docx and xlsx files. I just open them in the earlier MS Office after having downloaded and run, the above program. There is a brief pause after double-clicking on the document at open, while the file converts. The extension is not changed. So it saves in the same docx or xlsx extension.

Sometimes, the file at open registers as Read-Only, at which point I have to save it to some other location before I can work on it.

This post has been edited by brainout: 25 December 2012 - 05:30 AM

[rohnski]

If you don't like DOCX, you can simply set your 2007/2010/2013 default to DOC: (2010) File menu > Options command > Save option > Save files in this format: you pick from drop down

Rather than renaming a file by replacing DOCX with ZIP I find it more convenient to simply add the .ZIP extension after DOCX. That way there is no confusion about the file type.

Yes, I have seen that the switch to the "x-files" formats has been a PITA. But, it does have the advantage of migrating away from the old binary formats which were corruption prone.

Of course, there is no silver lining without a cloud. The new formats have introduced new types of corruption. I've seen a lot of people in Word with XML tag problems. Word simply "forgets" to put a closing tag in, or puts it in the wrong place. Most commonly this happens when they add equations to documents. There is a partial fix in Office 2010 SP1.

And there is is the "USB truncation" problem. When people copy a file to USB drive but forget to close it properly part of the file may be truncated. The "problem" is the design of the x-file structure. Unfortunately the text portion of the x-file is near the physical end of the structure. If they had put it at the front, then at least we could have possibly saved the text content, which is more important than formatting without text. Of course, an old binary format file is totally hosed when this happens, so that is worse.

[ndeb]

I work in the nonprofit world and we use RTF routinely, along with tons of PDF files. Personally I still use Ofc 2003 because I hate the ribbon inteface. Not being the youngest person in the room, I don't much care for having to decipher oh-so-pretty icons to do simple tasks with Word and Excel.

I did download the compatibility utility so I can handle docx, etc., files from people who don't know how or can't be bothered to change defaults always will send you files that would otherwise be unusable.

But my longterm solution is to dump Microsoft altogether and use Libre Office, which seamlessly handles all the new and old formats. And it's free.

[brainout]

ndeb, on 25 December 2012 - 04:45 PM, said:

I work in the nonprofit world and we use RTF routinely, along with tons of PDF files. Personally I still use Ofc 2003 because I hate the ribbon inteface. Not being the youngest person in the room, I don't much care for having to decipher oh-so-pretty icons to do simple tasks with Word and Excel.

I did download the compatibility utility so I can handle docx, etc., files from people who don't know how or can't be bothered to change defaults always will send you files that would otherwise be unusable.

But my longterm solution is to dump Microsoft altogether and use Libre Office, which seamlessly handles all the new and old formats. And it's free.

It's not so seamless. It can't read complex formatted documents created in Word 2003 and prior, or WordPerfect. It gets the formats wrong, the colors wrong. I have LibreOffice and would rather use it, but often I can't. It's okay for very simple documents and spreadsheets. Its spreadsheet is daft, changing the time-honored F5 function key (Go to, then type the range name or cell) into a convoluted hassle. And, it cannot read wk1 files, which MS Excel 2003 and prior can still do. (For 2003, however, you have to download a special patch from MS, if you're using the regular MS Office 2003 updates, since those updates prohibit read/write of certain file types.)

Alternatively, IBM Lotus SmartSuite might overcome these problems; I'm testing its version 9.8 right now. You can buy new or nearly-new copies of it at Amazon for less than $50, or buy the latest version at IBM for over $400. The latest version is compatible with Windows 7 and 8, but maybe 9.8 is compatible with Win7, I'm testing that.

The bigger advantage with SmartSuite: unlike Libre and MS, SmartSuite can directly read a worksheet range and use its data for merge word processing. That's core to my business, and I've had to stay on DOS because of it. So maybe SmartSuite will finally be my ticket away from DOS. We'll see.

Presumably since IBM is now on the Linux bandwagon, someday they will adapt the product for Linux. Their Lotus Symphony has all the drawbacks of LibreOffice.