The lock-out begins for Office Mac users

Send to a friend Print

Help more people find out about this story

Del.icio.us
StumbleUpon

Tim Gaden04 December 2006, 11:13 PM

The launch of Office 2007 for Windows signals the beginning of a long lock-out for Office for Mac users, who will be unable to read the new file formats.

Microsoft has 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:

 

 

Not the best result for inter-platform collaboration within the workplace!

Office 2003 for Windows users can download a compatibility pack which makes it possible to open Office 2007 documents. However, while the Mac Business Unit has promised converters, it is providing no certainty on when they will be available.

A spokesperson for the MBU reminded APC of its promise at WWDC that "free downloadable converters would be available" following the release of Office 2007 for Windows, but was unable to tell us when.

"Unfortunately it is still to early for us to say when the converters will be available", she said.

Hopefully, I asked two developers who produce alternative word processors that currently import and export Word documents (Mellel, Nisus Writer Express) if they were planning to have converters for their apps available before MBU gets around to releasing theirs. Sadly, not.

Dave Larsen of Nisus said that resourcing is the big issue for small developers: "At the moment, we don't have any plans to do it. However, once the new Office gets released, I suppose we will seriously look into it."

Of course, Office 2007 applications can save their documents in "backward compatible" formats, but that be a pain for co-workers and Mac users alike.

Perhaps the only good news to come out of the announcement is the reluctance of businesses to upgrade. According to some sources, businesses will wait up to two years to make the switch.

Perhaps Mac users will have the converters they need by then.


Related stories

Read more stories about

Post your comment



Reader Comments

 RSS feed Email alert

John:

Really Mac user`s, if you want to run Mac`s in a business setting your shooting yourself in the foot. As a Mac user for a few years I quickly found out how having only 1 to 2 percent of the market greatly affects how much support outside software makers put into Mac compatibilty. Almost none! If you want to be a Mac user, then use Apple software! This is the big reason why Apple cannot compete.They would be better off being a hardware company and offering their great computers with Windows on them.I believe they would probably have 30 percent of the computer market.

report abuse reply

Kevin:

"They would be better off being a hardware company and offering their great computers with Windows on them." Wow. You really just don't get it, do you?

report abuse reply

Tommy J:

I was dared by our network engineers to replace my windoze laptop (which i ran over with my car....symbolic I'd say) with a Macbook Pro and see if I couldn't perform my job just as easily as before. Being a security engineer I had some doubts with the types of apps I run, but I went for it.

Who gives a crap about office 2007? By the time our enterprise adopts it either crossover will work or the next MAC office will be out. docx...that a joke. Let's turn a single file into several so we have to zip them up.

Shot in the foot? I think not. I'm running MAC, Linux (X and Console) and Windows apps....without having to use Parallels (which is NOT a solution).

For the o2k7 lovers try this. Open an excel doc across the network that someone else already has open and see if it gives you the opportunity to open a read-only copy like o2k3. NO! It says the file cannot be found. Who wants to use that piece of crap?!? Wake me up when it's worth something.

report abuse reply

aBitGone:

I remember, using an early beta of Office 2007, that all the new file formats are zipped. When I wanted to see this, I changed the extension of a .docx file to .zip and took a peek inside.

It might well be that inside the ZIP file, there's a little more to check - I'm fairly certain that you'd be able to get hold of a little more information than the garbled mess you got first time round, but I can't confirm that! :o)

report abuse reply

Tim Gaden:

@ABitGone: Yes, they are zip files and someone has gone to the trouble of explaining how a Mac user can convert a *.docx file without converters - http://www.eightysevenfour.com/?p=14

The process doesn't sound like a viable one for most users though.



report abuse reply

William K:

Death to Macs!!!

Mac bashing - try it, it's fun!~

report abuse reply

raindog:

one of your best William, did you hurt your brain coming up with that? Best you keep quiet while the grown-ups are having a discussion!

report abuse reply

marc:

Tim, I think it's a little too much to say it's (deliberate) lock-out... as tempting as that thought might be!

It's not surprising that Mellel and Nisus will take their time on supporting these new formats (ODF as well), as it really is a lot of work... oh also because this has been hashed over in their forums since the 'open' formats were announced! ; )

Anyway, to the point -- OpenXML and ODF will both be readable on the Mac well before Microsoft get around to supporting it -- both AbiWord and NeoOffice are decent WPs, and both will support OXML+ODF and allow you to save out to DOC/RTF etc.

...and don't forget that Leopard will offer basic support for both formats as well, just as TextEdit has basic support for Word DOC now.

Not perfect, but workable.

report abuse reply

tin:

Yes, an IT department CAN configure it to save in the old format by default... But will they?
I'll bet no. Especially in government IT, who are the worst offenders for sending "doc" files to people anyway.

report abuse reply

raindog:

So if every IT dept sets the defaults back to ye-olde formats is the new format actually warranted.
I'm sure a big part of the format change was due to open office induced paranoia yet clearly the most inconvenienced sector will be the masses running existing versions of MS office. Sure, 2007 can be configured but I'll bet you London to a Brick it wont be in most cases. IT departments can do their best to configure their own companies machines, but they can do nothing at all to stem the inevitable tide of incoming emails with unreadable attachments. And headache that this is, it alone is simply not enough justification to warrant uprading an entire workforce's software applications to a newer version.
Let the confusions begin!!!


report abuse reply

SIGINT:

Tell me, when you installed a new software, did you just go with the default settings? It's the nature of software, you can change the defaults. Change the defaults to an "open" standard office document and be done with it.

And it's not like the end-users will be the ones that's configuring the fresh Office 2007 installs. Tell your IT department to do it. The end-users will be none the wiser.

Stop with the Mac-whine.

report abuse reply

David Flynn:

Signint, it's also very much a Windows whine (which based on market share would be equivalent to at least 20 MacWhines [that's imperial MacWhines, which are 1.43 metric MacWhines].

Seriously, any problem this present for Mac users is a drop in the ocean compared to the woes it brings to the Windows community, many of whom will simply not apply the Office 2007 compatibility pack to their pre-2007 version of Office.

That subsequent hassle, the emails and phone calls and confusion of"I can't open your document/spreadsheet/presentation" will be sufficient to drive many users back to the older formats.

Yet in my experience, the vast majority of users (business and home) have no idea of how to configure or customise Office beyond its out-of-the-box defaults. This is where the problem lies.

Don't get me wrong, I like pretty much everything about the new Office 2007 "x-files", and I wish we could all be using them with zilch compatibility worries. But alas, that ain't the case.



report abuse reply

tin:

I thought the inconvenience of not having Open Office able to open them would be bad... And here's MS showing us that they are at least playing fair and making life hard for their own customers too.
Classic

report abuse reply

Tim Gaden:

I didn't think of that.

I rather tribal, I'm afraid, the pain of ten Mac users affects me more than the suffering of thousands of Windows users.

But it's a good point.



report abuse reply

David Flynn:

Tell you what, my advice to anyone using Office 2007 would be to change the default file save format from XML back to ye olde doc, xls and ppt so that they never have to worry about saving a copy in another format, figuring out who needs which copy of the document etc.

Unless you have one of those wondrous but mostly mythical collaborative workflow environments which hinges on XML to expose in-document data to other XML-aware apps, it's simply not worth the pain right now, nor perhaps for years to come.



report abuse reply

raindog:

The scarce few Mac Office users will be less of a worry than the general confusion created with other windows users. Those who have been around for more than 5 minutes will remember just how painful it was with the gradual migration from Office 95 to Office 97. It's a simple thing to select save as "older format", simple until you try to get all the company desk droids to remember to do it. Tower of Babel here we come again!

report abuse reply

I, Robot:

WHY??? Would MS do something SO STUPID?? This isn’t going to hurt Mac users at all. However, this is totally going to hurt ALL Windows users 100%. I knew MS was greedy, but I would never have considered them THIS stupid! (Did Bill Gates leave Microsoft? What idiot is running MS now? Is this some sad revenge for their crappy “Zune” Music Player?)

All a MAC user has to do is NOT UPGRADE – Duh! Problem solved. But a Windows user will have to deal with a new Vista OS, a new Word file format, and a bunch of Word/Excel/Access/PowerPoint documents all saved using the old file format. On top all this Google has a brand new Office/Excel/PowerPoint -esque software available FREE on the web, and guess what their documents save as *.doc files. So basically, there’s NO need for MSOffice at all. (Taking money out of their own pockets.)

This is a lot of needless hassle that's going to comeback and bite Microsoft in the ass, when their customer support starts getting “ump-teen” number of complains from companies who’ve paid X amount of dollars for word processing software isn’t backwards compatible. Which could have been avoided, if they had left well enough alone. HAHAHAHA… Dumbasses.


report abuse reply

Anonymous:

Apple and M$ have an agreement that M$ will support Office for Mac for a number of years. M$ are nibbling away at the edge of this agreement, first by dragging their heels on a universal (x86) version of Office, and secondly by lack of X filter provision for their existing Mac product users. I'm sure Apple are now thinking seriously about their side of this deal. Remember, M$ make a lot of money from Mac Office. A far higher percentage of Mac users have genuine (non pirated) versions of of Office than Windows users. Expect Apple to stop promoting M$ Office soon....