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New Office formats could tie granny(and your office) in knots
Feels a little like spotting the first swallow of Spring... we have just had our first file conflict with Microsoft's new Office formats. I'm running Vista and Office 2007 side by side with an XP machine running Office 2003. Our copy-input system is built round the old file formats.
Old Office versions do not even see the new formats, which have an 'x' on the extension (ie name.docx), unless you choose the All Files option in the Open File dialogue box. If you click a docx file within XP and follow the prompts you are led to a site where you can download a filter - all 27Mbytes of it - that allows the old Office to read the new formats.
Even so you can get very confused dealing with both formats. I mistakenly put a .docx file into our system, which read it as gobbledygook. It was a small matter to replace the file, but imagine this happening in offices and homes all over the world: grannies who can't read letters sent by their grandchildren; people stuck without a web link with a document they can't read....
The new formats are a Good Thing, in my humble, leave or take the argument about whether Microsoft should have taken more seriously calls for an openly-agreed open standard for basic functionality. As they say: no pain, no gain.
You can specify that Word 2007 (and presumably every Office app), only deals with 2003 file formats. I can't, specifically, remember how to invoke this, however.
I commend Microsoft's new suite for this.
I think "the world" needs to agree on an open format, or have one dictated to them.
Adobe's PDF format, even though it is proprietary (hope that's spelt right; it's late), at least has a numbering system, so that compatibility can be assessed by the "reading program".
For example, to read a 1.0.x (i.e. 1.0.5) PDF you need Adobe y.z (i.e. 7.1).
It would help if, for the major office-style applications, (WP, spread sheets, common databases, published pages and presentations), there could be a numbering system similar to Adobe's, when an open system is developed.
That way if a word document was saved in the "1.0.5" format, it could be opened by any program that supported that format/feature set OR HIGHER.
[
So for word processing (.doc, .docx), you would have:
.w1_0_5.
(Note: it could be just .w (etc) with 1.0.5 in a meta tag.)
(Office programs: .w(ord)... , .s(heet)... , .d(ata)... , .g(raphic)... , .p(resentation)...)
]
Therefore, with an open standard, you could say, if a new addition/mod came out, i.e. 1.0.6, or 2.0.0 it would be up to the software writers to make sure that their programs featured the new feature set.
This could be done simply through a process of online updates (like Microsoft's excellent service), or for the case of major updates to the spec, (i.e. 1.0.6 -> 2.0.0,) a new version of the software could be released, where companies (like Microsoft) could (justifiably) promote the benefits to the user of having access to the features available in the NEW 2.0.0 spec.
I don't claim to be an expert here. What I've said is over simplified - but there's nothing wrong with simple. Indeed, sometimes the simple can be overlooked, so I'm glad I've written this somewhere on the world wide web...
Have a great day,
mc2
Posted by MC | March 10, 2007 1:25 AM