ITS/Helpdesk : Microsoft Office 2007 and CWU

Microsoft Office 2007 and CWU

The introduction of Microsoft Office 2007 brings some exciting new capabilities to a product that most of us use daily. A few of the significant improvements over previous versions are; more comprehensive collaboration for group documents, easier integration of a variety of media within documents, and far greater control of custom formatting. As is often the case with a major upgrade of software, there are some factors which slow its widespread adoption within many education and corporate environments. One of these factors affect the CWU community.

Previous versions of Office are unable to read the default 2007 file formats (for Word, .docx instead of .doc). This means that, as more members of the CWU community purchase 2007, we are increasingly encountering problems with incompatible file formats. There are several options available while the different versions are being used. There is a converter for the older Office version that users can download so they can open 2007 files. Office 2007 users can also save the files in the older format. For details on these options, check out Office File Formats here.

If you are using Office 2007 and plan on sharing files with people using Office 2004 on the Mac, you'll have to save your files in the older format as there are currently no converters available for the Mac version of Office. The Mac version of the new Office suite (termed Office 2008) and its file converters are slated to be released later this fall.

For more information or assistance, please contact the ITS Helpdesk:

Bouillon 112
M-F, 8-5
509-963-2001
helpdesk@cwu.edu