I get regular enquiry about opening the new Word (standard) documents in earlier versions of Word. Apparently Microsoft has seen fit to change a well established document format and make it different in response to criticism that the documents produced by Office programs were not open source. My conspiracy theory friends believe it is so they can more easily track who wrote a document and what computer was used. Maybe they are right, I don’t know.
What I do know is it is a serious pain in the bum when somebody sends you a document that you are unable to open.
The good news is, to cut to the chase, that the problem can be solved easily and better still for free. All you need to do is download the file formats convertor from Microsoft and install it on your computer. Just like magic you can now open those pesky DOCX files. If you do not have Microsoft Office installed on your computer you can still open these documents by installing the free “Open Office” program or ABI Word. There are also several viewers available as well that should allow viewing and printing of DOCX documents.
At the time of writing, this was the link to the download page. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=941B3470-3AE9-4AEE-8F43-C6BB74CD1466&displaylang=en
If this fails to work for some reason, goto www.microsoft.com and search for “docx file converter”
If you would like to know more about the DOCX format, try this website www.docx.net/
I hope this helps. If you found this useful, drop me a line and let me know.