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Bob Buckland ?:-\) Bob   Buckland ?:-\) is offline
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Default Converting all old Office Files to 2007 format

Hi Stefan,

So you're saying that MS should keep all of the old companies in business, or take over for them when folks retire or sell and
provide parts too so that you wouldn't need to do any planning etc?

I'm assuming you have the same copy machines from 20 years ago, you have the same car from the 80's and no problem with getting
parts, or with running it with leaded gas, or that you have a new car/machine/appliance and fully expect the parts, Beta/VHS tapes
all to work just fine in your DVD drive? Shouldn't your DVD drive be able to read the files you saved to diskettes of any size, or
to a backup tape? g.

For my job, why MS, or apple, or Oracle, or others often raises the questions, mostly rhetorically of 'why did they do *that*!' and
some hair pulling, but in the end the job is to get the thing that someone bought up and running and to figure out how to make it
all happen, with whatever tools that are available. That's not to say that it's uncommon for administrators to be frustrated that
there are folks being upgraded who just 'won't move up to the newest and greatest' (it works both ways, depends a bit on where you
are in the food chain of a particular process).

The advantage of the new file format in general came out to be for many of our folks to be that the files were smaller

It depends on what you're looking for and what you need to get done I suppose on what things are positives and what things are
negatives.
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"StefanKZVB" wrote in message news Hi Bob,

what you say would mean you would have to have multiple old computers in a
company
with old Office versions just to keep the old files readable. You don't have
any warranties or replacement parts for these old machines, etc.

In the long way you would even have to
think about strategies on how to transfer unreadable files to the old
machines etc.
That's lots of unnessesary TCO and administrators will eventually hate MS
Office for all the
effort it takes just to read some old files...

Also I think in fact you almost get FORCED to upgrade to new MS Office
versions
either because you receive the new not prefectly readable file formats from
outside.
Or because you need to be able to fix security holes which are
even still in the old Office versions. Though these versions already got
fixed for years over years...

So I really want Microsoft to improve the transitions to new file formats.

BTW: IMHO the main reason why MS created new file formats and the Ribbon
was to get incompatible to OpenOffice. Because those "innovations" are
not really better, just different. Well, in the case of OOXML not just
different but
worse than ODF. But I guess you know about that.

Best regards

Stefan
--

Bob Buckland ?:-)
MS Office System Products MVP

*Courtesy is not expensive and can pay big dividends*