Opening Office 2007 on Older Systems

One of the complaints we often hear about Office 2007 is that it wants to save files in a new format (.docx, .xlsx, etc). As I've blogged about previously, this is because Microsoft has created what they hope will be the new XML standard.

Solutions
Microsoft has released a filter that allows previous versions of Office to open these new files. But my daughter told me she had a problem at school because she couldn't open her files in their computer lab.

Thinking about Microsoft's goal, I decided to try an experiment with her. We right-clicked on a .docx file and choose Open With, then pointed to our Internet Explorer. Guess what! It opened the file!

That means sending these new file types to others can still work if they have a browser!

Let me know if this works for you too-- or if I just got lucky!