Creating Documents in Office 2007 to be Read By Users Of Older Office Versions

I'm writing this while watching a beautiful sunrise over the surf. The door is open and I can hear the rollers coming in. Ocean front rooms are cheap in South Carolina at this time of year. Temps are forecast in the 80's for the rest of the week. I sure hope the sleet and snow has melted when we get back on Monday.

I've been reading a bit re Office 2007. Office 2007 by default will save it's documents (when you tell it to save) in a format that cannot be read by older versions of office unless the owner of that older version does two things:

1. Has run "Office Update" (something similar to "Windows Update") to get all the latest updates from Microsoft.
2. Has downloaded software from Microsoft intended to enable them to read the new Office 2007 files

What this means is you could create a new Powerpoint presentation or Word document, send it to them as an attachment to an eMail and they would not be able to open the document on their machine.

Here is a link to an article on Microsoft's web site that explains the above in more detail

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/924074

The solution in the Microsoft article (see link above) is to have the receiver of your document take some action. There is also something you can do when you save the document that will assure you they will be able to read it: you can do a "save as" and save it in the older format. Here is a link to an article on the Binghampton University web site that tells you how to do that:

http://wiki.binghamton.edu/index.php/Using_Word_2007_%22sharing_documents_with_other_users_and_computers%22

Hope this Helps!