Watch Out - Microsoft Office 2003 Service Pack 3 Disables Old File Support
Thursday, January 03 2008 @ 04:57 PM UTC
Proposed New Year's Resolution..."I resolve to get myself out from under the thumb of Microsoft in as many ways as I can, starting with downloading and installing Open Office"
Many of you, my audience, have been hooked on Microsoft's products for long enough that you probably have old files around that were created with early versions of Microsoft Office; Word, Excel, etc.
Microsoft in their infinite wisdom have decided not only to disable support for these old formats in their latest update, but also those of Lotus-1-2-3, Quattro, Corel Draw and some others.
They do document a very convoluted way of working around this in their bulletin (where you can also see a list of the versions and files they are now blocking) but I have a better idea:
Download and install Open Office for backwards compatibility. Not only will it read an astounding list of file formats, it also is good enough now that many governments and large corporations around the world are standardizing on it, rather than Microsoft's products.
More information here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/938810/en-us
Open Office may be found here: http://download.openoffice.org/2.3.1/index.html
