|
Home »
Microsoft Office
» Microsoft Word
Summary: ".docx" is the new extension used by Microsoft Word 2007. There are a couple of approaches if you're exchanging documents with users of older versions.
I'm going to guess that with your new computer you also got some new software. In fact, I'm going to further guess one of those new software packages is Microsoft Office 2007. If that's the case, then what we have here is a classic cross-version compatibility issue. Fortunately there are two ways to solve the problem. You can solve it, or your recipients can. • ".docx" is the new file extension that Microsoft Word 2007 uses when it saves documents in the new default format. So you might save your document as "letter", but what Word 2007 writes to disk is "letter.docx" where previous versions would write "letter.doc". (I assume that ".docx" means .doc "extended", but that's an unimportant assumption.) As I said there are two possible solutions. • Save in the old format In Word 2007, rather than just hitting Save, click on the "Office Button" to drop down what we used to think of as the "File" menu, and hover the mouse over Save As:
Note that I've called out the option so save as a Word 97-2003 Document. This will save the file in the format used by these earlier versions of Word, and will do so with the normal ".doc" extension. If you always want to save in the older compatible format you can click on the Word Options button (always visible at the bottom of the menu displayed with the "Office Button"), and then click on Save at the left of the resulting dialog:
As you can see, you can select the Save files in this format dropdown. The default, as you might expect, is Word Document (*.docx). Change that to Word 97-2003 Document (*.doc) and your documents will be saved in the old compatible way. • "'.docx' is the new file extension that Microsoft Word
2007 uses when it saves documents in the new default format"
Open in the new format I actually covered this in a previous article: there is a "compatibility pack" that users of older versions of Word (and Excel and PowerPoint) can download and install to enable those versions of the product to read the newer file formats directly. In your scenario you would do nothing different. You'd keep sending out the new ".docx" documents. Your recipients, however, would all need to download and install the converters to be able to read what you've sent; or upgrade to Office 2007. • Which is the right solution for you depends on your situation. If your recipients expect to have lots of .docx files coming their way or just want to be ready if and when they do, then perhaps asking them to install the converter isn't that big a deal. On the other hand saving in the older formats to begin with minimizes the impact on them - at least for documents that you send. Related:
FREE Newsletter The Ask Leo! Newsletter - FREE weekly updates by email with the latest answers, tips, tricks and fun information you won't find anywhere else.
Why Subscribe? • Recent Comments
Interesting tid-bit for hardcore nerds - the new Office formats (such as DOCX) are actually ZIP files. Rename a DOCX to ZIP, then open it. Ta-da! Lots of interesting XML for the text, styles, and themes - the binary files are stored in their native state. Compressing the XML can make the DOCX file much smaller than the old DOC files - often by 50%. Some folks are converting from DOC to DOCX just to save file space. This also means that information inside the DOCX can be updated without using Word. Systems that need to update content dynamically within a document can do so programmatically without using Office automation. Sweet! Posted by: Dave B. at May 28, 2007 03:02 PMi have document dcx and i cannot download .what can i do? Posted by: joseph borg micallef at July 30, 2007 08:33 AMMac and P.C. users that do not own Microsoft Office, or users of earlier versions of Microsoft Office that are not covered by Microsoft compatibility pack, but still want to convert open and use Word 2007 DOCX or Excel 2007 XLSX files on their own computer, can use "docxconverter 2.0". See: Hi Leo. I love your site! I just wanted to let you know that we recently encountered this problem and our solution was to open it in Pages on the Mac. My husband is a teacher and unfortunately he is stuck using a PC the school provides with next to no tech support. So, he would not be allowed to install the MS update (or any other software) and it would be difficult for him to get ALL of his students and colleagues to convert their files so that his old computer can read them. However, I told him to reference the link to this page when and if he does request the sender to convert the file. (But thats like, you know, following instructions and that is usually a lot to ask of most! ha ha ha) In the meantime, for us at least, it's much easier for my husband to forward to me the email from his PC at school, I open the attachments on my Mac at home using iWork Pages, export them to Word, then re-attach them and send them back to my husband. It only takes seconds to do and is much more efficient than waiting for the response from the original sender. I just wanted to share this trick with you. Thanks again for such a wonderful reference! I share it any chance I get! Posted by: Melissa at January 23, 2008 09:52 PMInformative article, but it would be extra helpful if you included a link to where I could download the compatibility pack. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- The "previous article" that this article links to is about, Thanks, Leo
iD8DBQFHmnqmCMEe9B/8oqERAj+jAJ9LNnU8CTUqbGqx2cS/vDJ0/OjCRgCgiYO2 First time on your site. Quick question, I upgarded to 2007 office and for some reason my clients can not open my emails, it put my text like it is an attachment and also sends a wmv. file and another attachement. I never had a problem with office 2000. can is send my e-mail in a lower format or something??? I know about saving in WoRD and Excel to a lower version but cant figure this out. Help Posted by: dan fuchslin at February 13, 2008 10:42 PMYou can also use http://www.zamzar.com, which is an online converter and here is a review: http://www.oooninja.com/2008/02/zamzarcom-docx-odt-converter-review.html Another way is OxygenOffice, which is a special edition of OpenOffice.org. You can use OO to convert to older formats such as .doc: http://www.oooninja.com/2008/02/installing-oxygenoffice-fedora-7.html Posted by: Andrew Z at February 24, 2008 08:58 PMHi Leo Post a comment on "What's a "docx" file, and how did I get one?":
|
Archives Advertisers |
|
