"Graham Mayor" wrote:
2. .doc might become unusable with a future version - like Powerpoint
2007 can't read Powerpoint 4.0/95 files
This has never happened with Word before. Word can (still) open all previous
versions.
I wouldn't have expected to become old Powerpoint formats unusable. And I
hope it will never happen to .doc but who knows?!
3. The "native" mode of applications is likely to be more tested /
bug-free / stable. Here's an example of a buggy implementation of a
compatibility featu
http://www.microsoft.com/office/comm...=en-us&m=1&p=1
It's a bit of a leap to believe that may be true, given that Word's doc
format has been around mucvh longer, but I take your point. Do your old
You can simply try out and reproduce this issue yourself. MS can also
reproduce it.
documents have this problem, or only new ones you are creating in
compatibilty mode? If not I still see no reason to mass convert old
documents. Those that need to be altered to cater for modifications that
would benefit from the Word 2007 features can be done as the issue arises.
It seems you are just making a lot of unnecessary work for yourself, but
then I'm not paying you ..... 
The problem from the link can't be worked around for us by unsetting the
compatibility option since we are using third party fax software that
requires this compatibility option to be set. We set the option by a macro
before printing the document to a fax printer and reset it to its old value
afterwards. The compatibility option worked fine with Word 2000.
But it's just an example for issues that might occur with compatibility
options since they are less used and tested than native mode. And when
problems occur everybody (including MS if you are not a very important
customer to them i.e. due to the number of clients affected) will advise you
to switch to native mode (when the issue finally is tracked down to a
compatibility option which might be a long way)
So why not avoid those problems from the beginning? We don't want our
users/IT department to struggle with issues in compatibility mode.