How in the Tech

Defaulting to .doc File Format in Word 2007

By Adam Myers ⋅ February 26, 2009 ⋅ Tags: Microsoft Office

Up until recently, Microsoft has been pretty good at maintaining binary compatibility across releases of Microsoft Office. Binary compatibility simply means that documents saved in a newer version of Office are readable in previous iterations. This has actually been the case from Office 97 through Office 2003 – but as you are likely aware of now, Office 2007 introduced a new binary file format for most documents, including Word and Excel – .docx and .xlsx respectively. As a result, Microsoft also released a compatibility plugin for older versions of Office that allows interoperability. Unfortunately, most users aren’t aware of this, nor is it apparent what they can do when they receive an XML File Format .docx document. It’s because of this that most users have begun just saving their documents created with Office 2007 in the hold file format – when they remember! Thankfully, it is a pretty easy to change the default save as file format.

1. Open Microsoft Word and click the Office Button in the upper left.



2. Click Word Options in the resulting pop-up.



3. Select Save from the left-hand menu. From the right-hand window you`ll see an area titled Save files in this format. From the drop-down change it to Word 97-2003 Document (*.doc).



4. Finally, click OK.

A similar process is availbe in the other Office 2007 applications as well. Now the onous won`t be on you to remember to  change your document file type on documents that will be going out to friends and colleagues.