Windows Office 2007 files not compatible with Mac Office 2004

Those who keep saying "there will be a converter for Mac users" are missing the point. Of course there will be a converter. No one said there would never be a converter. But it's MONTHS away. Not days or weeks. MONTHS. Spring 2007 is what they are publicly saying now: http://blogs.msdn.com/macmojo/archive/2006/12/06/converters-coming-free-and-fairly-fast.aspx

A matter of months for JUST a converter is not "fairly fast."

When I read this posting this morning, I was disappointed. I personally felt no one at the MacBU had been given a chance to provide input, or clarify a timeline based on this recent publicity.

Thankfully patience got the best of me and I e-mailed at contact in the MacBU. From this, and probably many other people, they posted this helpful article on their blog just a little while ago.

http://blogs.msdn.com/macmojo/archive/2006/12/06/converters-coming-free-and-fairly-fast.aspx

Now settle down and relax. That team tries the best they can, and it's not easy working under conditions of being an outsider of sorts on the Redmond campus, and then having no support from the Mac base.

-Jason

Who the Fxxk is Microsoft?

Yeah, I'm with others here who say people need to relax. New versions introduce new formats. New formats can mean improvements (as certainly in this case). Sometimes improvements mean you have to do a little more work for backwards-compatibility. No different with Microsoft than anyone else.

And yes, while I agree they're not as powerful (though that's not necessarily the point), Office is now again part of a diverse landscape that includes OpenOffice and various online alternatives.

It looks to me like the planned MacBU ship plan for the converters is really quite prompt. (Incidentally, Office 2007 will most certainly work with Vista -- no issue there. Just in case you're upgrading your MacBook!)

I'm sure if you want some reason to get upset with a developer, you can find one of substance. But thanks to TUAW for pointing this out, so people know to save as XP .doc for a couple of months. ;)

PC users with older versions of Office have the same issue. As said before in the comments above Microsoft is planning retro-updates to add compatibility.

People who are using Office 2007 (like I do at work, yuk) do have the option to save their files in the old .DOC and .XLS formats that work fine across all versions. There is no requirement to save using the new format.

@henrikk - You'd be surprised about how quickly an organization can change "standards". All it takes is one exec who learns all about technology from in-flight glossy magazines, with a new install of Office 2K7 - who then demands that the organization change rather than he change a simple default on his own PC.

@Laurie

Your pessimism is less than delightful. Do you take an MS-bashing stance on principle, or to endear yourself to your audience?

The Mac BU operates, for all intents and purposes, as a standalone organization within MS (I suggest you read their blog if you haven't - http://blogs.msdn.com/macmojo/ ). They're already in the midst of the herculean task of migrating Office to Xcode for the next release. http://blogs.msdn.com/macmojo/archive/2006/11/03/it-s-all-in-the-numbers.aspx Not to mention they effectively have to wait for the final release of 2007 before they can complete any import-export plug-ins for Office 2K7.

Of course, there still remains the point that O2K7 is available only for software assurance customers. That Microsoft is STRONGLY advising their customers to upgrade both Office and Vista simultaneously.

I would suggest, Ms. Duncan, a glass of warm milk and a nap.

I see no one has mentioned Nisus Express yet, I ditched Word in favour of it earlier this year and I've not looked back. A very nice Cocoa wordprocessor which does all the useful stuff Word does without the slowness and feature bloat.

Sorry, but this whole article is so cynical. There will be a solution, if not from MacBU from someone in the opensource community or someone who needs a solution. In fact, there might even be an elegant solution.

Plus are there any numbers on how widespread Office 2007 is yet? Is it really that big of a problem?

Also, I've never had a compatibility issue with Mac Word 2004 and any Windows user or Linux user, for that matter. Does anyone know if Google Docs supports the new file format yet? I know they signed on for openXML or whatever, and apparently docx is a modified version of that.

One side comment: who doles out these gold stars "School of rock" style in 5's to the writer of the article? It always seems so arbitrary.

I am sure neooffice would be great, if their download was working...