On CCSF Faculty and Staff computers the official, installed version of Office is 2002 or XP, which includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access and Publisher. Now, Office 2007 is making an appearance on some computers:

• In student labs, in locations where Office 2007 is being taught.
• On some new Faculty/Staff computers, especially laptops, if the faculty member teaches or staff supports Office 2007

Compatibility Problems

1. Documents created in Office 2007 don't open in older versions of Office. SO: If your students send you 2007 documents, you can't open them, and vice-versa
2. Office 2007 puts new file extensions on its documents that are not recognized by other programs—even by earlier versions of Office

Solutions

• For Windows: http://tinyurl.com/y5a879
• For Mac: http://tinyurl.com/29lkb7

1. Word: Save As Word 97-2000 Document:
   Saves as .doc—compatible with older Word versions
2. Word: Save As – Other Formats - .rtf: The Rich Text format is supported by all word processors and preserves most basic formatting from 2007. After clicking Other Formats, you still have to choose Rich Text Format from the Save as type box.
3. Of course, you can always convert the file to a PDF that can be opened by the free Acrobat viewer. Microsoft provides an Add-in for Office 2007 that allows you to save directly to PDF. It's free and available at http://tinyurl.com/lvthp

Problems with downloading

Mostly for those teaching Office 2007: If you post Office 2007 files in their native format, meant to be opened by students using Office 2007 - you still run into problems! Files don't seem to come down in a form that Office 2007 recognizes....

Solutions

1. These problems do not occur in the Firefox browser, available free for both Windows and Mac. So the simplest way of dealing with these problems is to tell your audience to use Firefox. Otherwise:
   
2. Explanation: Some browsers—specifically Internet Explorer (Windows and Mac), and Safari (Mac)—change the extension of the files to .zip when they download. Before these files can be opened in Office 2007 the extension has to be changed manually to the correct extension for the application: