Many people use MS Office, which is a suite of products (such as Word, Excel, and Powerpoint). In MS Office, the word processing program is MS Word. The newest version, Word 2007, saves documents with the extension .docx and these documents (if saved this way) are only able to be read by other computer users who also have the 2007 version.
A study shows that 50% users have Office 2007, while 50% have Office 2003. When a 2007 user sends a word, excel, or powerpoint document to someone who has Office 2003, the default formats in Office 2007 cannot be read from Office 2003. To resolve this problem, the Office 2007 user needs to change the default to a format that Lower versions of Office can read.
for MS Word 2007 USERS:
1. Open Microsoft Word 2007
2. Click the “Office Button” (top left of your screen), then on the bottom of the list click “Word Options”
3. The “Word Options” window will open. Now click on “Save” in the left panel
4. Change the top option (in the right panel) “save files in this format“ from “Word Document (*.docx)” to “Word 97-2003 Document (*.doc)”
5. Click “OK” and you’re all done!
for MS Word 2003 USERS:
If you have Office 2003, then you should click on this link and download the following “compatibility pack”
Click Here
This will allow Users with Word 2003 to be able to read and save documents sent to them that were originally created by someone using Word 2007.
Following the above steps will give you the ability to save all your documents as *.doc files, and will save a lot of compatibility headaches!
If you have Word 2007 and still want to save a document in the new *.docx format, just select the new format when saving individual documents.
