Carl Hutzler’s Blog

Windows Vista is out in the wild and some of my clients are starting to see Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents which the older versions of MSFT Office can not open. These documents have extensions which are similar to the current extensions but have a trailing X. For example, Word used to have a .DOC extension. The new extension is .DOCX. Powerpoint and Excel have similar changes to their extensions.

There is a patch available for Windows MSFT Office users here:

It works with these versions of MSFT Office applications:

Microsoft Word 2000 with Service Pack 3, Microsoft Excel 2000 with Service Pack 3, and Microsoft PowerPoint 2000 with Service Pack 3
Microsoft Word 2002 with Service Pack 3, Microsoft Excel 2002 with Service Pack 3, and Microsoft PowerPoint 2002 with Service Pack 3
Microsoft Office Word 2003 with at least Service Pack 1, Microsoft Office Excel 2003 with at least Service Pack 1, and Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003 with at least Service Pack 1
Microsoft Office Word Viewer 2003
Microsoft Office Excel Viewer 2003
Microsoft Office PowerPoint Viewer 2003

There is no patch available for Mac OS X versions of MSFT Office.
- The best bet is to use a patched version of MSFT Office on Windows via Parallels or Bootcamp until the new Mac OS X version of Office arrives in the second half of 2007 (if it doesn’t slip). Or you can have the person who sent you the file try and SAVE AS an older version that your version of Office can open.