2007 Compatibility Pack problem

[jar]

We have an issue with some machines which have the Office 2007 compatibility
pack installed (with Office 2003) in that it won't open Word documents saved
from Word 2007 if they have a .doc extension.

If we rename the file with .docx, the same document opens OK. Rename it back
to .doc and it fails to open. You get the general message about selecting
which encoding to use to open the file.

Is there a setting somewhere in Word for this or is this normal behaviour ?
One person has said they can open the docs at home OK but we don't know for
sure exactly what software they have on their home pc.

Thanks

 

[Yves Dhondt]

There is no setting to solve this. Just tell people not to type the
extension themselves.

Word uses the extension of a file to decide on how to open it. "doc" means
that the file is in the older Word file format while "docx" means it is in
the new open xml format. If you change the extension by hand, or save the
document with your own specific extension, Word can fail to open it because
it doesn't recognize the format.

It sounds as if the person who created the document saved it as a Word 2007
document (the default) but forced the doc-extension upon it, thinking that
would be better. So Word sees "doc" and tries to process it as if it were
the old format while it is the new one. As a result, it doesn't recognize
the content and thinks it is in some strange encoding.

If you want everybody to be able to read your documents, even if they don't
have the compatibility pack installed, you need to save your document in the
Word 97-2003 format (under Save As in Word 2007). That way, the document
will automatically be assigned the "doc" extension.

If you really don't want to use the new format, you can set Word so that it
saves files as Word 97-2003 by default. "Office button" -> "Word options" ->
"Save" -> "Save files in this format".

Yves