There’s a really important article on Bink that you should check out. Gartner (I rarely pay attention to these sort of companies) has recommended that all organisations should deploy the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats.
What’s the big deal?
Anyone who’s been in the business for a while remembers the "good old days" when every version of Office had it’s own unique formats that were not backwards compatible, e.g. someone would mail and Office 97 document to a client who had Office 95 … the recipient wouldn’t be able to read it and would have to get the sender to save in the older format and resend. This fun and games probably caused millions of helpdesk calls. This all went away with the last few versions of Office, e.g. an Office 2003 user could send a file to an Office XP user with no problems.
Things are changing.
Microsoft has changed the format of Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents in Office 2007 so that they are XML based. Why? Are they trying to cause us grief? No. This change in formats will likely be welcomed by busienss software developers. XML is a language that is portable between applications and is often used to transport data between those applications. This will make it easier for business applciation developers to integrate their solutions into the Office suite.
Sure, some developers and vendors will kick and scream about the new formats sayign they’ve not had a chance to keep up. But here’s my opinion take … Tough! The product has been available for aroudn a year in public beta and release candidate versions, just like Vista was. If you cared about the customers who bought your products then you’d keep up and take advantage of the new features.
Office 2007 does support the older versions. This means you can still save documents in these old .DOC, .XLS and .PPT formats for sharing with non 2007 users. But if they use this new compatibility pack, they’ll be able to open, edit and save the new formats that you can use.
Credit: Bink.