So you have upgraded to Word 2007, but none of your friends, colleagues, co-workers, family, pets, neighbours, local government officials or industry tycoons have upgraded yet!  

And even worse still, they are all too lazy to download the Office Compatibility pack!  Can you believe it!

So what are you to do?  Well if you are one of the many people out there in this situation, about all you can do is save your Word 2007 documents in the old Word 97-2003 .doc format.  Only problem is every time you go to save, you need to use a few extra mouse clicks to make it happen.  If only you could set Word 2007 to default to save as a .doc file? 

Well guess what – you can!  Here is how:

1) Open up Word 2007

2) Click on the Office Menu (the circle button in the top left hand corner of Word 2007)

3) Click on “Word Options”

4) Click on the “Save” button in the left hand column

5) Look at the very first option on that screen – it lets you select the default save format.  It will be currently set to “Word Document (*.docx)”.  You want to change it to “Word 97-2003 Document (*.doc)” using the drop down menu.

6) Click “OK”

There you have it!  Now Word 2007 will automatically default to save your documents in the old Word 2003 format.  And more importantly, all your friends, colleagues, workmates etc will now want to talk to you again!

‘till next time!
TNP