Office 2010: defaulting to 97-2003 file formats

[John Gray]

As part of the conversion from Office 2003 to Office 2010, I am considering setting up the default save file formats to be the 'back-level' 97-2003 ones, DOC instead of DOCX, XLS instead of XLSX, and so on. My argument is that it will make our output viewable by all the other organisations and individuals which haven't yet moved to Office 2007 or 2010, and who don't know about the FileFormatConverters.exe Office Compatibility Pack.

I'm not aware of anything in the 'X' formats which would be required for anything we do. Views from you, please!

[HansV]

Many organizations take the same stance, including the one I work for. It is a sensible decision.

(But one wonders how many individuals and organizations remain unaware of the Compatibility Pack, which was released over five and a half years ago, in December of 2006...)

[John Gray]

I suppose you could ask, "How would harassed individuals and small charities without proper IT support become aware of the Compatibility Pack"?

[StuartR]

I suppose you could ask, "How would harassed individuals and small charities without proper IT support become aware of the Compatibility Pack"?

Because they discovered that they couldn't open Office files from some people.

[John Gray]

Hmmm. In my experience what happens is that they ask the sender to send a readable version of the original file!

[DaveA]

Then the sender should send a link to the "Compatibility Pack" and not a Readable copy of the files.

[StuartR]

I ran Office 2007 with the default set to create 97-2003 file formats for a few years, but stopped doing so a long time ago and haven't had any complaints. If you are migrating your users across then you could set this default during the transition, but I don't think it is generally needed any more.

[John Gray]

Then the sender should send a link to the "Compatibility Pack" and not a Readable copy of the files.

In an ideal world, yes - but the recipients want the document/spreadsheet/etc, not yet more software to install.
Perhaps "in addition" the link should be sent, but whether many people would use it...

[AlanMiller]

I ran Office 2007 with the default set to create 97-2003 file formats for a few years, but stopped doing so a long time ago and haven't had any complaints. If you are migrating your users across then you could set this default during the transition, but I don't think it is generally needed any more.

How do you rate the two interfaces against each other? I've just started the 2007 "experience" and find it most frustrating. But it might be the same reaction I have to new generation electronic goods - wondering just why they wrecked all the good features and added a bunch of useless stuff, most of which is not explained in the instruction manual!

Alan

[HansV]

The Office 2007 interface is the first iteration of the new "ribbon" interface - it is rtather clunky. The interface has been improved in Office 2010 (and I assume Office 2013).
Since the "look and feel" of the ribbon is quite different from the familiar menu/toolbar interface, it takes some time to get used to it, but it will become familiar in time.
There are quite a few things to like about the ribbon - it exposes many more commands directly than was possible with the menus. But Microsoft also made some unfortunate design decisions that detract from the usability. In particular, "power users" find that commands they use frequently now take more mouse clicks.
But resistance is futile in the end - we'll see the ribbon in more and more applications.

[stuck]

The roll out of Office 2007 across where I work was slow so the old formats were set as the default to ensure compatibility during this time. Even though the transition finished a long time ago the default deployment still uses the old formats.

Within my team we've found that .xlsb works well for us (saves us having a mix of .xlsx and .xlsm files) so we tend to use that but we're not sharing workbooks outside our team so compatibility isn't an issue.

At the end of the day it depends with whom you are going to share your MS Office files. If those people are cash strapped and likely to be running 'old tech' then using the old formats is probably sensible. Otherwise move on.

Ken