Read Office 2007 documents without installing Office 2007

by Brad Linder Oct 10th 2007

Microsoft Office 2007 may include a bunch of nifty updates from previous versions of Microsoft's office suite. But it also includes new document formats for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. In other words, it causes a bunch of headaches when an Office 2007 user sends files to Office 2003 or OpenOffice.org users.

There are a bunch of services that will convert the new .xlsx, .docx, and .pptx files to old fashioned .xls, .doc, and .ppt files. But Microsoft has a solution for anyone who just needs to read documents without editing them.

This summer Microsoft release a compatibility update allowing Office 2003 and earlier customers to open the new file formats. It turns out that update also lets you use the free Word Viewer 2003 to read .docx files. Now Microsoft has also released PowerPoint Viewer 2007 with support for .pptx files.

There's no update to Excel Viewer 2003 yet, but we're guessing it's just a matter of time.

[via ActiveWin]

Tags: compatibility, docx, excel, excel-viewer, powerpoint, powerpoint-viewer, pptx, word, word-viewer, xlsx

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Chris Carey said 4:22PM on 10-10-2007

Or you could just add the compatibility pack, which is way more effective since you can just open and save as usual with your ordinary everyday version of Microsoft Office.

http://www.noheat.com/2007/03/19/convert-xlsx-to-xls-and-docx-to-doc-easily/

Also there are file converters here as well to convert Docx to doc and xlsx to xls/

Thomas said 10:04PM on 10-10-2007

NeoOffice, OpenOffice or iWork are all good alternatives too.

Ryan Worrell said 8:42AM on 10-11-2007

This is some serious old news. This has been available for months.

Mike said 8:43AM on 10-11-2007

FDV (Fast Document Viewer) can open the new and old documents for MS Office:
http://www.scalabium.com/fdv

Kumar said 8:44AM on 10-11-2007

Good Piece of Information Given Here.

Thanks

Kumar

http://www.xanga.com/microsoftofficesupport

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