Office applications Toolkit

Inside Office 2007's files

Elsa Wenzel CNET

Published: 30 Jan 2007

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Microsoft has rebuilt its host of Office applications from the ground up. Along with the bold interface changes and new features in Office 2007, revamped file formats will affect how you work in Word, Excel and PowerPoint, regardless of whether you plan to upgrade to Office 2007 from an earlier version.

If you're using the 2000 through 2003 versions of Office, you'll be able to open the new Office files after you follow Microsoft's prompts to install compatibility updates. You'll also be able to open older Office files within the new Office 2007 applications, although some of the new features won't work until you save the older file in the most recent format.

The 2007 file formats for Microsoft Office software are Open XML-based, so they compress more information into fewer kilobytes and thus require less hard drive space than their predecessors. An added X marks the extensions of these new files; for instance, the DOC extension from Microsoft Word will be DOCX in Word 2007, Excel's XLS becomes XLSX, and so on. Other Office 2007 file extensions include DOCM, for Word documents that enable macros. The Open XML format, also known as OOXML, will be open source. However, Office 2007 software will not let you save work in either the Open Document Format used by OpenOffice or in the formats from Corel WordPerfect.

If you plan to share Office 2007 files with people who use older versions of Microsoft Office or rival Office software, the following pages tell you what you need to know (you can also view our video to walk through these steps).

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Review Microsoft Office Standard 2007 is a worthy upgrade if you need to make sleeker-looking documents and presentations to share with others, and Outlook is better than ever. However, you can stick to your current software if you don't feel that it lacks anything. [30 Jan 2007]

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