Stump the PC Club is a free tech-advice column written by members of the North Orange County Computer Club, which has been in existence since 1976. Visit the club’s site at noccc.org.
QUESTION: Someone just sent me a Microsoft Word document and I can’t open it. I’m using Office 2003 and I told the sender my problem and they don’t know what to do. Can you help?
PC CLUB: Both Microsoft Office 2007 and Office 2010 have a default setting for saving documents in a newer format called Open XML. Those of us with older versions of MS Office have to do a little extra work to open this new format. You can read more about Open XML at http://bit.ly/openxml.
There are several things you can do to open these documents without spending the money to upgrade your version of Office.
1. You can E-mail the sender and tell them to save the document in the older format. They can do this by selecting File, Save as and selecting in the “Save as type:” the more compatible “Word 97 to 2003” format. You can actually make this the default for saving documents.
2. You can download the free OpenOffice program and install it. It is compatible with all versions of MS Office and is available at http://download.openoffice.org/. There is a portable version requiring no installation at http://bit.ly/portableopenoffice.
3. You can download and install the free Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack. Microsoft provides this for users of older versions of Office to enable them to open, edit and save documents in the new Open XML format. You can read the requirements for and download the software at http://on-msn.com/xmlpack
4. You can view these Open XML documents even if you don’t have Office installed by downloading and installing the Microsoft Word Viewer from http://on-msn.com/wordviewer2. There are viewers for other Office products including Excel and PowerPoint. Just search Google for “Excel 2010 viewer”, for example.
If you should choose to use the OpenOffice program to open the newer Microsoft Office Open XML documents, be aware that OpenOffice cannot save documents in the Open XML format. It can, however, save documents in its own native format or in the “Word 97 to 2003” format. If you have the ability to view file extensions on your computer you will notice the new Open XML documents are .docx files while the older one are .doc files.
Ed Schwartz is a member of the North Orange County Computer Club. To send in a question, go to edwardns.com and click the Contact Me menu. Archives of previous columns are also on the website.