Oh. Gee. Thanks.

I got an e-mail message from my editor, Cliff, today. He wanted me to send him a Word 2007 file to test a converter on his Mac.

I don’t use Word 2007 regularly. That’s a Windows program. I’m primarily a Mac user. I still use Word 2004 on my Mac. But I do have Office 2007 installed on my Windows PC, which is running Vista. I needed it to write about Excel 2007 for Windows. Of course, Word is part of the Office 2007 package, so I had that, too. I guess no one else at Peachpit does. But that doesn’t surprise me, because Peachpit is a publisher and uses mostly Macs.

I fired up my PC, started Word, and created a short document with some formatted text. I saved it to my Public folder, which I then opened from my Mac. I called Cliff into iChat, I pasted the document’s icon into iChat, and sent it to Cliff.

The whole time I was wondering why I didn’t know that Word 2007 for Windows files couldn’t be opened from Word 2004 for Macintosh. Could it be because my Word for Windows books were not revised for Word 2007? (Too many other Word books out there.)

The Converter

Cliff sent me a link for more information about the converter. I followed it to an entry on the Mac Mojo blog, “Mac Mojo : Get converted“:

…We are developing the product [Office] for versions beyond 2008 with broad investment in native Mac OS X architecture as well as adoption of a new, next generation document format: Office Open XML.

We’ve made great progress, and as previously promised we’re releasing some of this new functionality in a form that you can start using right away: Beta release #1 of the Microsoft Office Open XML File Format Converter for Mac is now available for download.

So the converter is just a beta.

I followed the link and found myself on the Microsoft Macintosh Downloads page. A link marked Office File Format Converter Beta (Word) brought me to a page with details about the converter. The information around the Download link told me that the file was 24.9 MB in size and that it would take 2 hours and 10 minutes to download with a 56K modem. Since I only have a 512K connection to the Internet (remember, I live on the edge of nowhere), I started that download right away.

The resulting file is a disk image that, when opened, displays an installer. When I got the installer going, I was quick to notice that it was installing over 8,000 files on my hard disk. Can I repeat that? Eight thousand files.

What ever happened to plugin-like converters that hid as single files in a specific folder where you could find and delete them when you had to?

The application, which is only 3.9 MB in size, is installed in the Applications folder. I double-clicked it, saw a little information screen that told me what it did, and was presented with the Office Converter window. I dragged the Word 2007 file I’d created for Cliff into the window, and waited. About 3 seconds later, I was told that the conversion was successful. (The test file had 18 words in it and two kinds of formatting were applied to some of them.)

The test file was not converted to a Word 2004 format file. That might make too much sense. Instead, it was converted to an RTF file. When I opened it, I found all formatting intact. There was also a blank area for a header and footer, which I didn’t even know RTF supported. Here’s what it looks like in TextEdit.

Why the Wait?

If you can read the sarcasm in this post — I really have tried to tone it down — it’s because I don’t understand why Microsoft had to change Word’s file format in the first place. I also can’t understand why they waited nearly five months from Office 2007′s initial release to come up with a converter for Mac users and the rest of the world. Remember, Word for Mac users aren’t the only ones who can’t read the new Word 2007 format; none of the existing Word converters for Mac and Windows work for Word 2007 files.

Perhaps Microsoft believes that its user base should take the extra effort to save files in previous Word formats when they need to share with non 2007 users. If so, Microsoft needs to understand that the average user doesn’t know the first thing about the type options available in the Save As dialog — no matter how many authors write about it. They save it in the default format and they’re done. What’s worse is that if they open a document created in an older format and attempt to save it with a different name, Word defaults to the new format, then displays a dialog that could easily confuse many users.

In case you can’t read that (I had to reduce its size to fit it in the text column here), it says:

You are about to save your document to one of the new file formats. This action will allow you to use all the new features in Word 2007, but may cause changes in the layout of the document.

Click OK to continue, or click Cancel and select the “Maintain compatibility with Word 97-2003″ checkbox to preserve the layout of your document.

So you do click OK and possibly have changes in the document’s layout? Or do you miss out on the new features? And what about Word 2004 for Macintosh?

Word 2004 isn’t even mentioned here. But if you use the Word 97-2003 format, Word 2004 on a Mac can open the file. (Why didn’t they just call it Word 97-2004 format?)

More Testing Needed

Obviously an 18-word file is not much of a test. But I don’t have any very complex files created with Word 2007 to run through the converter. If I do get some time to create and test a complex Word 2007 file with the converter, you can read about it here.