I have a copy of Microsoft Office 2007 on my laptop. When I save files from Word, I can’t open them on my PC, which has Office 2003. So, why can’t Microsoft Office 2007 files be opened in Office 2003?

The reason is due to Microsoft creating a new file format called Office Open XML. There are numerous advantages to this, one being smaller file sizes compared to the older version of office. By default, all Office 2007 files now have an x added to the end; .doc is now .docx, .xls is now .xlsx and so on. Therefore previous versions of Office cannot open these new files natively.

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