Microsoft set the standard for corporate arrogance in the computer industry. I believe they may have hit a new high (or low) point. Word 2008 for Macs and Word 2007 for PC documents are not compatible with previous versions of Word. There is supposed to be a converter but several people on the Macintosh news group I subscribe to have found that the converter doesn’t work. The result ?
Interesting to hear that only Word 2008 & 2007 will read the Word Docs.
That is only the default as the product ships. (As if that is not bad.) The user of Office 2008 can set their default to be for the earlier format (and I would suggest that they do that.)
The same situation exists for Office 2007 on the PC. I’ve had several clients find that the colleges that they’d sent their applications to were not able to read the new format files and the colleges had taken the quick route and just ignored the application since it was unreadable by the college (and had not followed the specification if one existed.) With the average user not having a clue for the un-readability, many college applicants got denied or lost a significant opportunity due to having the most recent version with a default of a non backward compatible Office.
The colleges are being pretty calloused to ignore applications without a warning to the applicant but Microsoft had to know that this sort of thing would be a problem.
The new version of Word is also supposed to be slow. The solution ?
There are Open Office and Star Office, both of which produce documents compatible with the older Office standard. And they’re cheap ! College students don’t need all the bells and whistles of Microsoft Office.
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Intresting, I never knew that before thanks!