[Yves Dhondt]

It's a new file format. ".docx" files are basically zip archives (you can
change .docx to .zip and open the files in Windows) containing a bunch of
xml files.

The advantage of the ".docx" format is that it implements the 'open xml'
standard (both ECMA and ISO certified). This is important as governments
world wide are starting to ask for open standards for documents. The new
format also has some advantages for programmers: they make it much easier to
create and manipulate Office documents without user interaction. Also, as
".docx" files are actually zip archives, they tend to require less disk
space.

As it is a new format, older versions of Word are not automatically capable
of handling the newer files. To solve this issue, Microsoft released a
compatibility pack so that the new file formats can be used by older
products. However, there are still a lot of people out there who use Word
2003 or earlier and who haven't installed the pack. So if you frequently
exchange files with people using Word 2003 or earlier, you might want to
consider saving your documents in the old ".doc" format. If not, ".docx" is
the way to go.

Yves

"sheana" wrote in message
...
Hi,

I have MS Word 2007 and Windows 7. Can you tell me what the extension
".docx" means when I save a document? I always saw only the ".doc"
extension in previous versions. Thanks in advance.