Converting Word 2007 to earlier versions of Word
or to other file types
Microsoft Word 2007 documents end in the suffix: .docx
These cannot be read on earlier versions of Word, however a pop-up prompt
from Windows will invite you to download a converter program onto your
computer.
Here is a link to the relevant bit of the Microsoft website …
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word/HA100444731033.aspx
and click HERE for the downloading page
from this site.
You will see that downloading time is over an hour for someone with a dial-up internet connection. If you have Broadband internet, you can click on one of
the DSL/Cable connections … perhaps the 256k one. Then click on the “Download” button.
When I tried this in the past, I was able to read a .docx document, but
I wasn’t able to edit it. If any of you can edit such a document with an
earlier version of Word, I’d be pleased to hear from you.
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Using Open Office for the same purpose (after downloading it
onto my computer) … I was able to read a .docx document, but
I was unable to edit it.
So I will stick with the Open Office version of Word for the time being.
Open Office is free to download off the internet…
http://www.openoffice.org/
It‘s a large download (150MB), and you’ll find it’s faster to download it
early in the morning, while most folk in the USA are fast asleep.
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Owners of Word 2007 can create documents that are readable by those with Word 2003 … click HERE to see this article on how to do so.
They can also download a plug-in from Microsoft which allows conversion of .docx files to PDF format (which can be read by computers which don’t have Office 2007. Click HERE for more info on this.
The same article also talks about using cloud computing for file conversion, recommending the following website … http://www.zamzar.com/
Zamzar will allow you to convert a variety of file types to a large range of
other file types. This is free of charge up to a maximum of 100MB. The
converted files are emailed to you. The downloading time from Zamzar was slow
for me … 20 minutes to download a 1.21mb PDF file, at midnight ! The resulting
PDF file was created by Zamzar with the Adobe PDF program, but it was
un-editable.
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Another option for Word users is just to use Word for in-house use only. A
couple of our U3A members refused to open any email attachments, so I used
to copy & paste the text and tables from Word documents straight into the
body of the email itself.
I've read about people having to print off Word 2007 dccuments and then
scanning them back into their computers, in order to edit them. I reckon all
these problems with Word 2007 are a marketing ploy to encourage folk to buy
Office 2007, and also to stamp out piracy of Microsoft's products.
Earlier today I received an update from Windows, saying that it was designed
to spot illegal copies of Office 2007. Who would wish to download this if
they were using it illegally?
