Joyce Valenza’s Neverending Search

Charlie, an 11th grader, came in with a problem we’re likely to all face in the next several weeks.

He saved his documents–due last period today–as Word 07 docs. And he couldn’t upload his file into our older versions of Word. (Of course, he should have saved as an older version or RTF. We’ll work on that for next time.)

I thought I could fix this one easily by importing the file into NeoOffice or OpenOffice. Nope.

I thought I could bring the file into Google Docs, AjaxWriter, or ZohoWrite. Nope.

With my colleague Tammy, one of our tech teachers, we searched for converters–on the Microsoft site and at Source Forge.

Finally we found it. You need to download and install fileformatconverters.exe

Then try to open the document choosing Word 07 from the dialog menu.

The Microsoft description:

“Open, edit, and save documents, workbooks, and presentations in the file formats new to Microsoft Office Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007.”

Hope this helps some others.