Convert Annoying Word 2007 to Earlier Word Docs

There’s nothing more worse than being one of those people who decided there was no need to “upgrade” to Office 2007, but having a client or two who just couldn’t help themselves. Sure the ribbon interface is pretty and all, but the new file format - not so necessary for 90% of us. So, what do you do when you receive one of those .docx files from a client and need to view it in an earlier version of Word? There are actually a few options.

First off, there’s DocX2Doc.com, which I used to use pretty frequently (before just caving and upgrading to ‘07). It’s free and allows you to upload a docx file and get a fairly quick conversion to doc format for Word. If, however, you don’t feel like waiting in their conversion queue, you can pay $7.95USD for a 1 year subscription, which bumps you up in the queue immediately.  The subscription version also allows you to quickly convert from docx to PDF, txt, HTML and many other formats.

If you’re not into paying for the service, there’s the Office 2007 Compatibility Pack, which is available as a free download from Microsoft. It requires you have some version of Office installed, and the latest Office service pack. The advantage to this pack is that 1) It’s free and 2) it covers all Office 07 formats, including Powerpoint and Excel.

Lastly, courtesy of Lifehacker (courtesy of The Unofficial Apple Weblog), there’s Zamzar’s online converter, which does a variety of formats, not just Office, and can even do videos.

So you see, there are plenty of quick and clean conversion options for dealing with those pesky Office 2007 files. Before just finally caving in and upgrading to Office 2007 - and being a kind sort by setting its default save options to Office 2003 - I used Docx2Doc with great success.