Surprise! A DOCX File

The scenario is: you work on your documents and then you sent it out to your clients or to your customers, thinking your job is done and complete. By the next day, your email is crowded with complaints that say “They can’t open the file you sent them.” You know you’ve worked on it in MS Office 2007 and when you try opening the file yourself, voila, it’s there. So what’s their problem?

Chances are, you’ve just sent out a file extension that ended in docx. That’s right. Docx is the new file format used by Microsoft Office 2007. And the problem that you have in your hands is what they call “compatibility issues”. That means, docx files created by your MS Office 2007 can only be read by 2007 users as well. Tough luck to the Office 2000 users and even those lower than that.

So what to do? There are a lot of different ways for both parties to solve this problem, both you or the one who received the file. And all it takes is a simple search in Google. That is to either send them a compatible file so that they can read it, or they can do the work and find ways to extract the data that you sent to them.

In your end, Microsoft Office Word 2007 has a nifty feature called backwards compatability. When you try to run Save ‘As’ when you want to save your file, you can choose to save it as .doc which is ways more compatible in any other version of Microsoft Word. .doc has been the standard file format for all versions below MS Office 2007

The other way is to have the recipients do the work via an online converter. There are services in the internet that can freely convert your.docx files into .doc files so even if you don’t have Office 2007, you can still get the data you need. All you need to do is upload your file into the site and then download the resulting doc file.

To find out exactly how Docx files can be opened by online service, visit my website about opening docx files.