So my wife gets a letter of recommendation and sends it to me for printing. I download the attachment and go to open it, only to notice the file extension...the dreaded .docx. Great. I open the file with Office 2003 and I get a prompt asking if I want to download the compatibility pack to open it. Sure, why not....only it takes me to an "I'm sorry, you're page cannot be found."

After searching for it, I found the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats. (disclaimer: M$ likes to change their links so this might work, it might not...but it's current as of this writing). I downloaded the 27.5 MB patch and installed it. I was able to print the document.

This pack only works with Office XP and Office 2003. So that $100 copy of Office 97 you paid for will be obsolete soon unless, God willing, the adoption of Office 2007 follows the Vista trend. Why a company would put out a product that is not backwards compatible is beyond me.

Except for profit.

Luckily "An Office Open XML import filter is slated for inclusion in version 2.3 of the OpenOffice.org project^[41]" According to Wikipedia, there are some legal fears with M$ implementing XML in their documents and creating this standard.