.DOCX versus .DOC Files (aka Microsoft Office Compatibility)
With a lot of businesses upgrading computers and software you may have noticed the .DOCX or .XLSX file and that you are unable to open it in Word 2003 or Excel 2003. Well, this is because Microsoft made some changes to the way the new Office suite saves files. The fix is simple and is detailed below!
The Fix
Simply download the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack from Microsoft's website and follow the simple install. Please note that you should have all of your high priority updates and critical Windows patches fixed before installing this. So please ensure that your Microsoft system is up-to-date.
After running the fix you are good to go! You will be able to open the .DOCX or .XLSX files with ease and also be able to save them. Read on to find out why they made this change.
Technical Details
When we start to look into the differences of .XLSX versus .XLS we can see that the way the information is stored is vastly different. XLS is based on BIFF (Binary Interchange File Format), so the information is directly stored in a binary format. On the other hand, XLSX is based on the Office Open XML format, a file that derived from XML. The information in an XLSX file is stored in a text file that uses XML to define all its parameters.
You should notice that the .---X files are smaller their binary partners.
So what does all of this mean? Well, for us programmers, easier acess for data. For the end-users? Just a big headache.