As you may or may not know, Microsoft has launched Office 2007. The suite is a vast improvement over previous versions and now uses new file formats for when you save a Word (.docx), Excel (.xlsx), or Powerpoint (.pptx) document. Dubbed “Microsoft Office Open XML Formats”, these new file types don’t seem to be working in Mac OS X. Trying to open a document in Word 2004 for OS X gives you a bunch of random characters and undecipherable garbage like the picture above.
Those using the previous version of Office on Windows XP can download a converter and compatibility pack as a work around, but Mac users are left in the cold it seems. Apparently, no one can say when an OS X version of the conversion tools will be available either. What gives Microsoft? Either support your OS X users 100% or don’t bother at all. We want to be able to collaborate between Office-documents but this new file format is going to kill us!
The lock-out begins for Office Mac users [APC Mag]
I was really hoping that the new MS formats would be a move towards opening up Office to Open Source Standards. I don’t know anything about these new formats yet but lets give them the benefit of the doubt at least for a little while. Realistically nothing important should be written in Office ‘07 yet but it would be nice if companies started taking care of this kind of things before they launch a product.
Apparently, Office ‘07 for the Mac is slated in Q3 of next year, so it will be a while before we have ‘full’ interoperability.
While I understand that the Mac Business Unit at Microsoft is its own entity, I wish Office would be developed simultaneously for both platforms.
I wish MS would either completely support the product they have for the Mac, or officially pull the plug. Apple made their own, successful web browser when IE was canned for the Mac. We’ve already got pages, so if MS pulls the plug, I bet that Apple would up their game and make pages really work.
I’m just dreading the Office 07 changeover because we’re a mac-shop and all of our clients are not… AND we depend on the track-changes functionality for many of our documents that we use with our clients. I hope the corporate world takes a nice, long while before they switch.
looks like open source office platforms are a better idea
a virtual data cloud will become much more the norm for these sort of apps
desktops will be obsolete for most functions except for extremely rich manipulation or processor intensive work, like video editing, audio environments and grapic design.
You guys might find this blog post from the Mac office developers useful…
http://blogs.msdn.com/macmojo/archive/2006/12/05/converters-coming-free-and-fairly-fast.aspx
Microsoft lets you save in older versions of office formats in the program and apperently the mac version of office 2007 should come out late next year. Besides you going to be stuck using old formats for awhile until everyone starts using office 2007.
Please listen to Ben – The melodrama of “kill us” and “you’re about to get screwed” and “support it fully or not at all” implies everyone is going to be switching to 2007 overnight which is absurd. Way more people are NOT going to upgrade than will. Not to say that there won’t be problems but it will be years before you can safely send anyone a 2007 document.
Also, since CrunchGear is too lame to post an update to the story explicitly noting the link Erik provided I will note a bit of it here: “The Mac BU WILL issue free, downloadable file format converters that allow users to read the new Microsoft Office Open XML Format.”
http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3647521
You’re Famous
http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3647521
now there is a good solution for that problem: docXConverter for MAC OS X has been released today. it converts docx to rtf with almost no visible difference, take a look at the screenshots
you can download the trial for docXConverter from here:
http://www.panergy-software.com/buy/download.html
the demo is good for 20 conversions after that you have to buy it.
re:pastco
Yeah, in “spring” of 2007. Meanwhile we are already starting to receive .xlsx files now. Nice that the “corporate world” is waiting to upgrade…
And docx is not the only file that needs to be converted.
“Microsoft also announced that it will also ship a file converter for Mac OS X that will allow users of Office 2004 to translate between the old and new Office file formats.”
http://www.macwindows.com/office2008.html#021907c
For example, Jesse has enough money for the down payment and reserves but none for the closing costs
You guys can download the format convertor (Beta) from http://www.microsoft.com/mac/downloads.aspx?pid=download&location=/mac/download/Office2004/ConverterBeta_0_2.xml. Currently this Beta is for Word and PowerPoint files.