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           Thanks to Joshua Wickerham for permission to use this Photo.

Has anyone emailed you a Microsoft Word file or excel file made in Office XP that you weren’t able to open with your copy of Office 2003 or 2000?  That’s because 2007 saves Word and Excel files in a custom file type by default.  Word 2007 saves in the .docx format for instance.

Excel 2007 saves in the .xlsx format by default.  If this has happened to you there are two options.  One of course is to install Office 2007 on your computer.  The far lesser expensive alternative is to download and install the Microsoft 2007 conversion tool which allows earlier versions of Office to open 2007 files.  Note that this is a read only tool.  You cannot create 2007 files with it.  Office 2007 does allow you to save files in the format of earlier versions.  If you anticipate emailing any files created with Office 2007, you should do this so that your recipients can open them guaranteed.  You can download the conversion tool by clicking here.

There are other alternatives to Microsoft Office.  I have written about OpenOffice before, the most popular open source office suite.  It is totally free and many of its components, such as the word processing and spreadsheet components, have an identical look as Office 2003.  It is ideal for students.  You can research it further and download it here.

Another alternative is Google Apps.  Google Apps, which was heralded early on has not caught on as was anticipated.  It is a web based application which means that nothing is installed on your computer.

This means that you can work on your files from anywhere since you can also save your files on a personal storage space of your own on a Google server.  You can also save your files to your local computer or media as well.  You can access Google Apps here.

Brad Rudisail
Computer Network Technician-Network Security Instructor
Ashworth University

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 at 11:56 am and is filed under Microsoft, Innovation, Websites, Data, Digital, IT, Communications, Computing, Hardware, Business, Operating Systems, Internet, Software, Management, Careers, Windows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.