This week is a short Freebie since I am under deadline pressure.

As usual, my blog arises from my frustration or need to do something. 

I had a call from a client yesterday she was almost in tears.  She had been trying to open a document from her financial adviser and it had the file extension .docx.  She did not have a clue as to what document that was.

Just so this does not happen to you, let me explain. 

When Microsoft released Microsoft 2007 they changed the document extension save default to .docx. 

The problem with this new extension is that older versions of Word could not open the new document extension.

You can save documents in the old .doc format but you must select to do so when you save the document.

In order to open the document in an older version of Word like 2000 you need to download and install a conversion tool.

Below are a list of tools.

On-line file conversion tool.

Microsoft Compatibility Pack

DocxtoDoc - Conversion tool

The new (upcoming) Open Office 3 will open all the following extensions docx, xlsx, pptx files. (The release candidate 4 of OpenOffice.org 3.0 is now ready for testing).

In the mean time, another option is to use Word 2003 viewer which can be downloaded from this site.

So there you have it, you can now open any document!