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Do You Have Problems Opening an Attachment?

A few weeks ago our curriculum coordinator, Alan Lees, sent me a copy of an attachment he had received by e-mail, asking if I knew how to open it. The problem was that it had been created using Microsoft Word 2007, part of the Microsoft Office 2007 pack.

It's a given that recent software should always be able to open earlier versions, but that old software may not open advanced (improved) software. That's what happened here.

You're probably familiar with the earlier versions of MS Word which all used the file extension .doc. No problem! Almost anybody can open one of those. However, Office 2007 is based on a markup language called XML which uses a four digit file extension. Word uses docx. (Excel .xlsx and Powerpoint .pptx). You can Google "XML" if you really need to learn more about it.

So, from a practical point of view there are two problems. Those people using Office 2007 will be faced with an enormous majority of correspondents who will not be able to read the documents they email; and the rest of us will need to find some way to read an Office 2007 document when we receive one.

If you are using Office 2007 the solution is simple. Instead of clicking on "Save" to save your documents, click on "Save As" (from the File menu) then select "Save as Word 97-2003". You only need to do that once. After you've saved a document in a particular format any further changes will remain in that format if you then save in the normal way (either by clicking the Save icon, or by selecting Save from the File menu).

Opening a .docx document is more of a problem.

If you're using an earlier version of Word or Office, you can download a Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack by CLICKING HERE to go to Microsoft's download site.

So what about all of us who use Windows but don't have a copy of Microsoft Office? I use "Open Office" which does everything Microsoft Office does and is absolutely free. (I'll write about free software as soon as I get time.)

According to Open Office Ninja the conversion pack will work quite well with Open Office, Google Docs, Abiword, and WordPerfect, as well as Microsoft Office 2003. The Ninja recommends downloading from THIS SITE which does not require "genuine Windows validation".

I downloaded a copy to my laptop last week and have just opened my first .docx attachment. It works a treat!