Office 2007 File extension

Kasor

What wassup with the "...X" extension for the new Office?

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA100069351033.aspx

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taktsoi

i love Microsoft, i love their products, and i m not trying to be mean in this post. however, the below is just from my experience few weeks ago.

Although the new office 2007 file extension is nice, HOWEVER, for any computer newbie novice users, even intermediate users will definitely find a lot of problems opening the files with the OLD office softwares. How on the earth will you find computers in public such as school or library as well as businesses use the new office 2007 yet?

I have a few students of mine who have a new laptop with vista and office 2007 installed. As they are the novice users. They open the word, type their stuffs, and save their files normally. when they come back to school, they can't open the files. They were like "What's wrong with my file? why can't word open it?" I looked at their files and found out the files have a 4 character extension "DOCX". I was like" another victim of new office 2007. I told them nicely that by default office 2007 will save any file with X suffix unless certain tweaking is done. Therefore the old office won't recognize this NICE feature. They were like."what gives? why isn't new MS office 2007 giving me more power in productivity but now giving me this compatibility problem?" i can't answer this to them because we gotta ask MR. BILL GATE why.......

I believe ... MS should need to hear more opinion prior to releasing softwares....

Webmaster

www.techexams.net/blogs/jdmurray/reading-and-writing-office-2007-files-in-office-2000-xp-and-2003

Kaminsky

It's called progress.

It happens with every new OS upgrade, every new office product.

Not being a fan of MS however, I would have to conceed that this is one thing they can't be beaten up over. It's natural IT evolution and has been happening for nearly two decades.

That is presuming there is the ability to open old file formats and save as old file formats for when you want to take a file home to your 2003 version on your home PC. This is usual.

taktsoi

thank you for your nice info, webmaster. well done. i give u 5 stars.

I just installed on the test machine at work in case if the students request. However, I believe the administrators will not install on our configurations.

IMO, file compatibility issue is easy to fix. Microsoft could have done more in order to push the PROGESSES to end users. However, it just never happens......

This is part of the reasons why our tech guys are still learning everyday and supporting the users.

Nice, I will have jobs ever.

RussS

I believe .docx is a form of XML. I recently rolled out Office 2007 to a site and the first thing i did was to set Word to save as .doc and Excel to save as .xls

Slowhand

Yup, it's to denote that all the new Office programs save their files as XML for relatively easy porting from one program to another. The MS Office schema dictates how each file is laid out and read (as schemas are wont to do), and the Office 2007 programs display them as they're instructed. Eventually, a lot of programs will probably save their files this way, since everybody and their software-developing-brother is clamoring to be XML-compliant. In other words, in an ideal world, OpenOffice.org should be able to open a .docx or .xlsx file without any problems or data loss, given that the right schema is being used to interpret the file.

For now, though, a lot of people still use the older binary file formats. We'll continue to see the .doc, .xls, .ppt file extensions for a long time before the xml file-formats take hold.

ajs1976

I know there have been compatibility issues between different versions of office, but this is the first major change in office document formats since the upgrade from Office 95 to Office 97. 10 years is a long time when it comes to IT.

Webmaster

A good example of the XML format's purpose is the possibility to offer 'dynamic' Office docs online. When 'someone' opens a Word doc from a server for example, ASP or PHP could be used to modify the contents of the Word docx before it is presented. It can also be used to construct Word documents based on user input, for example an online Resume wizard.

Slowhand

Webmaster wrote:

A good example of the XML format's purpose is the possibility to offer 'dynamic' Office docs online. When 'someone' opens a Word doc from a server for example, ASP or PHP could be used to modify the contents of the Word docx before it is presented. It can also be used to construct Word documents based on user input, for example an online Resume wizard.

These are exactly the kinds of projects I was doing when XML was first up-and-coming. Trying to pull data from one document or datasource to another was always a pain. One particular use I've had for XML-based documents has been taking Word-formatted resumes from potential employees at my current company, converted them to the .docx format, and used a custom-written schema to read the resumes into a database for easier access by a central application. I've had a lot of success with it. (Well, aside from my own coding screw-ups, but that doesn't really take away from the versatility of XML formats.

)

Webmaster

Although our test engine has been using XML for the past 5 years, it wasn't until recently that I discovered how handy and powerful XML can be. Especially at first it was mostly just hype to me. I also like the XML in ZIP (that's what it is) combi. Although non-text data has to be serialized first, the eventual XML doc is basically text compressed by common ZIP technology. I'm working on an app that uses the same combi (by recommendation of JDMurray) and I really like it. The hierarchical structure of XML makes reading/writing data files a very different experience from for example plain text files. Selecting a particular XML node using .NET is downright easy, instead of going through an entire file to find a match (i.e. the Author info) you can simply do a SQL Select-like statement on the XML file. The result is the same, just less and better structured code. I still need to read up and learn a lot about schemas though, I currently always go with whatever is default.

Slowhand

Webmaster wrote:

Although our test engine has been using XML for the past 5 years, it wasn't until recently that I discovered how handy and powerful XML can be. Especially at first it was mostly just hype to me. I also like the XML in ZIP (that's what it is) combi. Although non-text data has to be serialized first, the eventual XML doc is basically text compressed by common ZIP technology. I'm working on an app that uses the same combi (by recommendation of JDMurray) and I really like it. The hierarchical structure of XML makes reading/writing data files a very different experience from for example plain text files. Selecting a particular XML node using .NET is downright easy, instead of going through an entire file to find a match (i.e. the Author info) you can simply do a SQL Select-like statement on the XML file. The result is the same, just less and better structured code. I still need to read up and learn a lot about schemas though, I currently always go with whatever is default.

That's how it was for me, too. I learned XML and some of the formats it can be used for pretty early on, along with XSLT. It wasn't until later that I began dabbling with XPATH and schemas, which put a lot of XML's power in perspective. Having that SQL-like querying capability is very nice. Within XML files, it makes finding and sorting data a breeze. Just like my first programming instructor told me, "All the world loves a database".

JDMurray

It looks like the next service pack for Office 2003 will include security features now found in Office 2007. The new .???x file formats are a big part of that security, so it's no surprise that they are also supported by Office 2003.

CNET: Office 2003 to get security upgrade
Introducing the Office (2007) Open XML File Formats