office 2003

Documents and Office XML Formats

This is a very short blog post; more of a rant than an actual informative post.

It’s the year 2013. Office 2013 has been out for sometime now, and the XML based office document formats such as .docx, .pptx and .xslx have been around since Office 2007. Additionally, there has been the Office Compatibility Pack (http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=3) available for download for at least since Office 2010 was released to allow Office 2003 versions of Office to read the XML based document formats.

Why, based on these two factors, do people still insist of sending documents through in the Office 2003-esque .doc, .ppt and .xls document formats? They are old and horrible. They take up well over two times the amount of space per file than the XML based file types as well as reducing the features available to the document?

I understand that some banks and larger institutions may still be using Office 2003 because of compatibility issues with other line of business applications, but the majority populous will surely be running a version of Office less than 10 years old?