Kerry Allen's Blog

Jun 25 2008

Word’s incompatibility with itself

Tag: Public service announcement, Tech status — Kerry Allen @ 4:50 am

So… another issue that has arisen with the dead computer situation…

In Office 2007 Microsoft introduced a new file format called the Microsoft Open Office XML Format (.docx). This format is not compatible with older versions of Microsoft Word or with alternative operating systems like Linux or Mac OS X. Nor is it compatible with other word processing applications like OpenOffice, Lotus 123, or NeoOffice.

I discovered this cute little feature months ago (”Sorry, we can’t open your submission”), had a nice rant (”Why the eff would they make a program INCOMPATIBLE WITH ITSELF? Oh, I suppose they didn’t want poor Word to feel inferior to Vista, which is INCOMPATIBLE WITH EFFING EVERYTHING!!!1!”), and didn’t think much else of it because I had that computer to deal with the .docx files if I absolutely had to.

So… yesterday I had need of one of my rescued files and, much to my everlasting joy, got heiroglyphics when I tried to open it on the laptop because the geniuses at Microsoft have made Word INCOMPATIBLE WITH ITSELF! Perusing the names of some of the .docx files I have (since, obviously, I couldn’t peek inside the files themselves), I realized this could be a rather serious problem.

All hail the mighty internet.

Docx-converter.com offers a portable solution for your compatability needs. It will convert a Microsoft Office .docx file into a simple html file. It strips out some of the formatting, but now supports bold, italic, and underlined text. Left, right, center, and justified alignment. Unicode characters. Tables. And more!

Voila! Worked like a charm on a plain old text document. My precious text is saved.

Now, to be fair, Microsoft has a “compatibility pack” you can install into your old, obsolete version of Word. If you trust Microsoft. If you want another piece of Microsoft garbage on your computer. If you don’t think Microsoft’s “hold the world’s data hostage to force them to UPGRADE—ka-ching!— to our buggy new products” policies are a disgrace.

But you can find that yourself, since I’m not sending traffic to those scumbags.

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