Computer Tips for “Regular People” - Opening MS Office 2007 Documents
If you are like me and have not upgraded to Microsoft Office 2007, you’ll notice that documents created with the new 2007 program don’t open correctly in Word. In the good old days, Word documents stored with a “.doc” extension. The new 2007 Word documents store with a “.docx” extension that does not automatically open in the old versions of Office. You might also discover that Excel and PowerPoint programs won’t open anymore, either.
There’s a quick fix from Microsoft called “Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats.” The download is free at Microsoft’s website.
How to View PowerPoint If You Don’t Have Microsoft Office
If you don’t have Microsoft Office and its PowerPoint software, there are viewers available from Microsoft that you can download, free of charge.
- For PowerPoint presentations created with Microsoft Office 2007, download PowerPointViewer.exe
- For older versions of PowerPoint, you can view them with PowerPoint Viewer 2003.
If You Can’t Afford Microsoft Office …
A free program called “Open Office” is compatible with Microsoft Office and other programs. It will work on your PC or Mac. The following programs are part of the Open Office Suite:
- Writer is the word processing component.
- Calc is the spreadsheet application.
- Impress is similar to PowerPoint for multimedia presentations. Better yet, you can export it as flash or html pages.
- Draw helps you make flow charts, organizational plans and so forth.
- Base is the tool to set up sql databases (sort of like Access in Microsoft).
Regardless of whether you’re a commercial user or just want it for personal usage, Open Office is 100% free.
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