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:

Joseph Bamber said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Joseph Bamber said...

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)

Mark Sohmer said...

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! :)

Anonymous said...

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..

Brad said...

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

Dmitry Linkov said...

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.