Are you or someone you know running an older version of Microsoft Office? Do you feel left out when someone forwards you and your friends a document and you’re the only one who can’t read it? Well, it’s time to stop living in the dark ages and the time is now to embrace the future.

As you may know, with the introduction of Microsoft Office 2007, Microsoft introduced new file formats for their productivity suite. The new formats created much smaller file sizes and are able to house some new features introduced in Office 2007. In other words, they added an ‘x’ to the end of the file (.doc became .docx, .ppt became .pptx, etc.). But Office 2007 was not embraced, some citing the new ‘ribbon’ menus as the reason and others claiming they had become attached to 2003. This caused problems because Office 2003 doesn’t support the ‘x’. Or so we thought.

If you are running an older version of Microsoft Office, regardless of your reason, today we’re going to learn how you too can open the new file formats.

Windows: Follow this link to install the Microsoft Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel and PowerPoint file formats (Microsoft requires you update your system before installing, I recommend it anyway).

Mac: Follow this link to install the Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac 11.5.0 Update. Restart your computer to make sure the changes are applied.