Office Suites - Upgrades and Conversions

MS Office 2007 

In 2007 MiicroSoft issued MS Office 2007. It came with fancy front ends for Word and the other components, along with a default file format that can not be read by prior versions of MS Office.  Of course, users of 2007 can be kind to their laggard friends and output work to be shared in older, comptabile formats. But sometimes they forget to do this, causing a flurry of activity that slows down collaboration.

Having encountered this myself, I snooped around and found something known as a 'converter'. This applet enabled me to read a file from MS Office 2007 format and output in formats compatible with Office 2000, 2003, etc. as .xls, .doc, .rtf, .ppt etc.

Converters 

That is really good news for us laggards. If you do not have Word 2007, don't rush out to buy it because a converter is available to move files (.doc, .rtf, .ppt, .xls, ) back and forth between the Word 2007 formats and the comparable earlier versions. (search for  odf-convert)

And a suggestion:

Switch to OpenOffice 2.41 which reads and writes all the MS Office formats before Word 2007 . It will have a 3.0 release later this year that will include the Word 2007 formats as well. OO is a complete office suite with word processor, spreadsheet, presentation maker and database manager. I have used it for more than three years and am very happy with it.  Moreover the cost is time to download (unless you want to buy it on a disk). IOW: It is free. It is available for PC, Mac and Linux operating systems. Personally,  I enjoy using good products from open sources as opposed to proprietary products that  may not conform to industry standards.

For nonprofits with a flotilla of computers to maintain, the cost difference between several copies of proprietary software and several copies of open source, free software is enough to balance a budget. Definitely worth considering.