If you try to open a file created in Office 2007 in an older version of Microsoft Office, chances are you won’t succeed.

This is because Microsoft created a whole new set of file types for Word, Access, Excel and PowerPoint. At first glance, you might be hard pushed to see the difference, but look closely and you’ll see Office 2007 documents have an ‘x’ at the end of their file extension: Word documents end with .docx instead of .doc, Excel documents now end in .xlsx, and so on.

The technical reasons behind this switch aren’t of concern here but if you’re trying to share a file with someone else, or you’re trying to open such a file in Office 2000, XP or 2003, these new file formats can cause problems.

Thankfully there are workarounds, which we explore in the Workshops section of Computeractive 266. So, refer to the magazine and then click here to be transferred to the Office Compatibility Pack download page of the Microsoft website.