OSNews

Skip a few items down.

OMG...you said Clippy! Let the nightmares return.

To be fair, MS Office also dumped Clippit after 2000.

Clippy and the rest of the animated office assistants are still in Office XP (just checked), and I'm pretty sure they're still in Office 2003, although I'd have to check at work.

Forget Clippy ... it's the whole "delete a space in the middle of a paragraph and watch the whole document reformat itself" issue that made me drop MS Office after Office 97.

WordPerfect is the only wordprocessor worth using.

Clippy and the rest of the animated office assistants are still in Office XP (just checked), and I'm pretty sure they're still in Office 2003

They are still there in versions XP and 2003, but they are not enabled by default. In Office 2003 it is not included in the default install.

I think clippy gets more bad press than he deserves. As a tool for the those who were technophobic it was actually a good ploy.

I can remember putting the Jonney Caterway screensaver on computers so they would use them.

SP3 doesn't add compatibility for docx.

You need this: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=941b3470-3...

to do that.

From the paper:"Legacy file formats created using Microsoft Office programs are also disabled by default ..."

You might want to actually read an article before you comment on it.

That refers to the "File Block" feature. The "Legacy file formats" in question that are disabled by default if you enable File Block are those of Office 97 and earlier. You can use File Block to disable OOXML files too, if you set it that way.

The MOICE security feature depends on the Office 2007 compatibility pack being installed separately, and will not work if the compatibility pack is not installed. File Block may also not work, as it might require MOICE.

Office 2007 file format compatibility is not installed with Office 2003 SP3 - I have confirmed this myself.

Edited 2007-09-20 23:05

The Office 2007 file format converters addon is compatible with Office XP as well, daddio, so your argument will have to refer to older versions of Office.

Sorry 'bout the language...

let me clarify. until recently I worked for a major oem doing tech support. MS loves to give away MSWorks along with a trial version of Office 2k7.

The two complaints I got most were
1) "I can't access any of the files I created over the last month" and
2) "I sent a document to my <teacher friend coworker> and he/she can't open it.

in case of 1) laugh like a pirate, point them to wordviewer and in many cases sell the angry customer a copy of Office (but that is another topic)

in case of 2) we would tell them that they needed to tell the person they sent the document to that THEY needed to find and download the compatibility pack from Microsoft. or save using the older format. They would inevitibly save using the older format rather than have that kind of conversation.