Office 2007 slims down after feature diet

David Pogue of the New York Times takes a look at Microsoft Office 2007. As I've said before, I've been using the program for a few months and love it, but didn't know this part:

The second big disruptive change is the new file format. Microsoft, to its credit, hasn’t touched the standard Word, Excel and PowerPoint file formats for 10 years. You never had to worry that your colleagues’ Macs or PCs wouldn’t be able to open your documents.

Now you do. The new file formats (.docx for Word, for example) are much more compact than the old ones, and they’re also easier to recover from data corruption. But older versions of Office for Windows can’t open them without a free converter (available at microsoftoffice.com). Office 2004 for Macintosh can’t open them at all, although shareware and Web conversion utilities are available.

- READ THE FULL STORY
- Walt Mossberg's review

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