Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Alert to Microsoft Vista and Office 2007 Users - Saving Word Documents

A word to the wise. As a recruiter, I receive hundreds of resumes as e-mail attachments. I prefer to receive them in MS-Word format. The problem is that when users of the Microsoft Vista operating system or Microsoft Office Word 2007 save a Word document, it is saved by default as a .docx file, which cannot be opened or read by Windows XP. So, unless you know that the person you are sending a Word file to has Vista or Microsoft Office 2007, please save your document as a .doc file rather than a .docx.

Thanks.

Al

6 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  2. Hey Al - a good tip, as I don't think docx is a good standard yet. However, if you need to open a file from Office 2007, you can download a converter software that will let you open these files with Office 2003. Here is the link from Microsoft. (or just google microsoft word 2007 converter)

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  3. I run Word 2007 at home and in the office and I have set it up so that it saves as the older .doc by default. So for you Word 2007 users who do not wish to annoy our pre-2007 friends, here's how to change it so it saves as the good ol' .doc by default:

    1) click on the "Microsoft Office" logo button on the top-left.

    2) click "Word Options"

    3) Click "Save" in the left pane, then select "Word 97-2003 Documents" from the drop down.

    4) Click "OK" and you're done.

    Now whenever you save a document in Word 2007, it will by default save it in the older and more readable .doc format, likely with no loss of functionality at all.

    I hope that's helpful! :)

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  4. Anonymous8:14 AM

    three suggestions all related..
    1.) Consider downloading and installed openoffice (free) as an alternative to MS Office). It can open docx. (for both sender and recipient)
    2.) Consider sending as a PDF, as OpenOffice can save files as PDFs built-in..
    3.) MS has a patch for non-office 2007 users that will allow Word 2003 to be able to read the docx format..

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  5. Al, what a timely blog. I just received my first docx attachement yesterday, and it drove me crazy using xp. Thank you users for throwing some advice on how to deal with this problem.

    - Brad Taylor

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  6. Hi Al,
    My solution is to simply save the document as a PDF. Then there's no question of someone not being able to read it. And, if necessary, I can restrict users from copying text from the PDFs.

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