Recently I’ve been shopping for a new computer for myself, and while I’ve been doing that I have also been helping my pastor and his wife shop for a new computer. Of course nowadays shopping for a computer also means shopping for an office suite- whether it is Microsoft Office, OpenOffice.org, or something else.
I have discussed this choice at length with my pastor’s wife. She has chosen to stick with Microsoft Office 2003, and has bought several installations of that on Ebay. It’s not that Microsoft Office 2007 is not good- I’m sure that it is. I’m sure it is an excellent Office suite. But their choice to add an “x” to their file extensions perplexes me to no end. When someone emails me a document created in Word 2007, I can’t open it because I don’t have Word 2007 on my computer. I have to go to one of those pdf conversion sites and use it to convert word to pdf so I can read it. That takes time, and I’m a classic impatient person. I don’t want to convert pdf or anything else to open a document! I wonder who at Microsoft came up with the great idea to make this change, because I certainly don’t see the wisdom in it!
