Re: How to detect 2007 vs. 2003 documents?

Hi Darrel,

Changing the file extension is a BAD MOVE. Doing so doesn't change the files to the Word '97-2003 format, and may even cause problems with Word 2007. Word 2007's docx and docm formats are actually zip archives containing compressed xml files, nothing like the '97-2003 file format.

So, yes, if you've changed the file extensions, you're going to have to test every Word file that's been date-stamped with a date on/after you installed Word 2007 to see which ones are actually in the new format, then change their extensions back again. To make this easier, if you write a macro to read the first two characters on any suspect files, the Word 2007 files start with the characters 'PK', whereas the older format start with the characters 'ÐÏ'. You can then re-save the files in the Word '97-2003 format.

For future reference, Word 2007 can be configured to save files in the Word '97-2003 format by default, without the users having to resort to File|Save As - see under Word Options|Save (easily accessed via Alt-t, o).

Cheers
--
macropod
[MVP - Microsoft Word]
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"darrel" <notreal@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:Ox9DTX%23mIHA.1280@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Apologies if this isn't the right newsgroup for this question...if it's not, please point me to a better forum for this.

The issue:

Our internal users are using Office 2007. They need to publish Word files to our public site via our CMS. We've told folks to not post docx files but instead 'back save' to Office 2003 doc files as a lot of the public has not upgraded to 2007 or has an office suite that can't yet convert 2007 files.

The problem is that some of our users, instead of using the SAVE AS feature instead renamed their .docx extensions to .doc.

So, we now have docx files littered throughout our site with .doc extensions.

Is there anyway to tell these files apart from actual 2003 .doc files? Windows, once you change the file extension, assumes the file extension is correct. Short of renaming each and everyone to .zip files to see if they decompress the docx format, is there anything we can do to find the improperly named files?

-Darrel


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