Tim Gaiden over on the APC blog posts about how the new office 2007 for Windows hurts Mac users.
Microsoft hsa officially launched Office 2007, but that’s bad news for Mac users.
Word, Excel and PowerPoint 2007 now all use different file formats: docx, xlsx and pptx.
Microsoft is calling these “Microsoft Office Open XML Formats”, but Office for Mac users will find them far from “open”. In fact, they can’t read them.
Take Word 2007, for example. By default it saves documents in the new *.docx format. Trying to open one of these in Word for Mac 2004 yields the following garbled mess:
