Word Document Compatibility
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http://live.pirillo.com/ – A word processing application allows you to write some text and save it. A question came in about compatibilities between different version of Microsoft Word, and other word processing programs in general.
Word to your mother! Excel to your father. Powerpoint for your sister! And uhm, Access to your brother? Yeah, anyway…
My first word processing ‘appliction’ was an electric typewriter. Yes, I remember those days well. Slow to start, slow to respond. Kind of gave a whole new meaning to the term “rough draft”. Do teachers still use that in school? No matter. On with the answer!
It’s actually easy to make old Microsoft Word documents compatible with the new version of Word 2007. The problem is in going in the opposite direction. It’s not always so simple to save a document in Word 2007 and then open it in an older version. There are many new features in Word 2007, and several plug-ins you can obtain to make the cross-compatibility easier on yourself. But to save a document in Word 2007 and then open it in another program altogether? Not so easy.
My recommendation is to save your documents in the .rtf (Rich Text Format) format. If you’re not doing much other than simple text, maybe some bold or underlining… this is the way to go. Saving a document this way assures you that you will be able open it using other programs, or older/newer versions of Microsoft Word easily. Of course, if you have a lot of formatting or design in your document, this option won’t work. Another good reason to save your documents in .rtf format is that they are much less likely to be hit by a virus.
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3 Comments
Jeff
August 22nd, 2007
at 8:16am
Word is the jackalope of Windows programs — not good enough to be a really useful desktop publishing environment like Quark XPress or Adobe Pagemaker, and far too bloated to be a good writing environment.
I’m forced to use Word at work, but often I save my work as plain ASCII text or UTF-8 so I can more easily import it and format it in Pagemaker (for print publications) or Dreamweaver (for the Web). At home, I use a 1980s vintage word processor called XyWrite. It runs in DOS, and it’s fast and efficient for me. But it’s getting harder to emulate DOS anymore in Windows and Linux, so sometimes I use Note Tab Light. Any of these will make for a much smaller filesize than Word, but they are also readable in a huge number of programs and platforms. Cross-platform compatibility is bad for Microsoft’s sales, so they discourage it, but it’s possible if you use your head.
Microsoft insists on making Swiss army knives, even where one simple blade will suffice. No matter what the work process, though, you’re wise to identify and stick with the common denominators.
Jeff
August 22nd, 2007
at 8:16am
Word is the jackalope of Windows programs — not good enough to be a really useful desktop publishing environment like Quark XPress or Adobe Pagemaker, and far too bloated to be a good writing environment.
I’m forced to use Word at work, but often I save my work as plain ASCII text or UTF-8 so I can more easily import it and format it in Pagemaker (for print publications) or Dreamweaver (for the Web). At home, I use a 1980s vintage word processor called XyWrite. It runs in DOS, and it’s fast and efficient for me. But it’s getting harder to emulate DOS anymore in Windows and Linux, so sometimes I use Note Tab Light. Any of these will make for a much smaller filesize than Word, but they are also readable in a huge number of programs and platforms. Cross-platform compatibility is bad for Microsoft’s sales, so they discourage it, but it’s possible if you use your head.
Microsoft insists on making Swiss army knives, even where one simple blade will suffice. No matter what the work process, though, you’re wise to identify and stick with the common denominators.
Paul
August 22nd, 2007
at 6:10pm
I’ve been playing around with different file formats myself. For the last few months I’ve used rtf, but I do like to throw in clip art, tables, and what not, and that’s where rtf simply loses compatibility among the various programs. Also, another problem with rtf is that there are different versions of it–MS just updated the standard to 1.9 earlier this year. Since rtf has fallen into such disuse, not many of the already strained for manpower open-source programs are going to update their reading/writing capabilites for it (as opposed to say, .odt format for Open Office). So I’ve fallen back on a new strategy–since it seems that Open Office’s slowness is easier for me to deal with than Abiword’s quirkiness (or Word’s proprietariness) I’ll just turn any doc I wanna share into pdf, and keep my own docs as .odt and run it off of Open Office.