{"id":127,"date":"2007-09-09T18:00:00","date_gmt":"2007-09-09T22:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/2d823b65bb.nxcli.io\/2007\/09\/office-2007s-confusion-mode.html"},"modified":"2010-03-18T11:25:03","modified_gmt":"2010-03-18T15:25:03","slug":"office-2007s-confusion-mode","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/2007\/09\/office-2007s-confusion-mode.html","title":{"rendered":"Office 2007&#8217;s Confusion Mode"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Although Microsoft publicly testifies from every available pulpit of their deep longing for multiple document formats, a quick glance at reality shows that this love remains unrequited in their products.  For example, what new formats does Office 2007 include out of the box?  A new Microsoft XML format (OOXML), an updated Microsoft binary format, and a different new Microsoft binary format for Excel.  So Microsoft clearly loves multiple Microsoft document formats! (Discuss among yourselves whether this love is <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">amour de soi<\/span> or <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">amour propre<\/span>.)  But what about other, standard formats?  ODF support is available only as a separate download, in their ODF Add-in for Word.  However this tool is <a href=\"https:\/\/2d823b65bb.nxcli.io\/blog\/2007\/05\/interoperability-by-design.html\">very poorly integrated<\/a> into the Office user interface, making it almost impossible to use for real work.<\/p>\n<p>For document exchange between different versions of MS Office, on the surface it looks a little bit better.  Office 2007 provides a &#8220;compatibility mode&#8221; for users of Office 2007 who wish to create or edit documents that will remain compatible with earlier versions of Office. <\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s the theory at least.<\/p>\n<p>In practice, things are rather messy.  I recently received an email from Julie Watson, a project manager who has been doing enterprise deployments &#038; migrations for 15 years.  She has spent the last few months working on a plan to migrate 18,000+ workstations, trying to find a way to have a gradual rollout while still maintaining round-trip collaboration between her Office 2003 and Office 2007 users.   Julie has put together a nice report showing what works and what doesn&#8217;t.  Ignore the official documentation and ignore intuition, since neither will serve you well here.  Take a gawk at the seedy side of reality in &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.slideshare.net\/funnybroad\/office-2007-compatibility-mode-confusion\/\">[Compatibility Mode] Confusion in Office 2007.&#8221;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Although Microsoft publicly testifies from every available pulpit of their deep longing for multiple document formats, a quick glance at reality shows that this love remains unrequited in their products. For example, what new formats does Office 2007 include out of the box? A new Microsoft XML format (OOXML), an updated Microsoft binary format, and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-127","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-ooxml","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=127"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":852,"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127\/revisions\/852"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}