hellsbrink:
But you shouldn't have to do that, Jofm, surely backwards compatibility should have been included.
Oops, silly me. Microshaft wouldn't be able to get people to spend an absolute fortune to "upgrade" then, would they....
Sorry hellsbrink - but you got it the wrong way round.....
P.Pilcher is saying that he cannot open .docx's within office XP because they are created with a Newer version of Word - so that would be building in forward compatibility not backward compatibility - they offer a free add on converter to Office XP for the new file formats so you can read and save in that format. It would be pretty impressive to build in compatibility into office XP for software they had not written yet.
So why the change to .docx when existing docs were fine - well what Microsoft has done is they have generated an Open Document standard which is based upon XML. A .docx file is a compressed XML document, if you use winzip or similar you can uncompress this document file and have access to the XML inside - the XML Schema is published so essentially anyone can read/write docx files without having Word altogether - it also makes pulling document contents into applications easier.
I guess with Microsoft they are damned if they do and damned if they dont - everyone complained that the DOC format was proprietry and guarded but when they change it to open and available people complain it has changed.
Incidently the backward compatibility is within Office 2007 - you can save to any of the previous native formats and edit in those formats for compatibility with users of previous Word versions.