Microsoft Word can be a wonderful productivity tool and then turn around to be one of the biggest productivity sinks known to man. As a web worker who has to provide my own Microsoft Word technical support plus being a veteran of a couple of Microsoft Office deployments inside organizations, I’d like to offer up the following survival tips.
Open Word 2007 Documents in Word 2003. The native MS Word file format changed with the launch of Office 2007 causing some confusion, consternation, and lost productivity amongst teams where users were split between Office 2003 and Office 2007. If your team is split between Office versions, have your Office 2003 users run not walk to Microsoft Office Online and download the Microsoft Office
Compatibility Pack for 2007 Office Word, Excel, and PowerPoint File Formats. Unfortunately, there is not a similar compatibility pack for MS Word on the Mac.
Open OpenOffice.org OpenDocument Files in Word 2007. You can open up OpenOffice.org OpenDocument Files in MS Word 2007 by clicking the Microsoft Office Button , selecting Open. From the Open
Dialog box, select OpenDocument Text, and then selecting the file you want to open and then clicking Open. However, as it goes with many document file format conversions, set your expectations realistically,
and don’t expect perfection.
Generate PDFs using the Microsoft Save as PDF or XPS Add-In. If a full version of Adobe Acrobat is
beyond your budget or just not a frequent need, consider downloading the Save as PDF or XPS Add-In for those times you need to convert your documents to a PDF.
About Will Kelly