Ask Owen

I need to send my CV to a job agency but I can’t seem to open it. I last edited in on a friend’s computer with Office 2007 and am now on my own machine (which has Word 97 on it). How can I open the docx file?

I got this question from a young friend of mine who was trying to send a CV for a job he found on a Miami Job Search site. Well, unfortunately there’s nothing that Microsoft supply that lets you open docx files on Word 97. You must remember that this is 13 years old now and has been out of support for some time. You might want to consider moving to a more recent version of the software.

Is that’s not an option there is a work around. You could download a copy of Open Office, a free Office Applications suite that lets you open and save documents in a variety of formats. It should handle docx files quite easily and it should also let you save the document in Word 97 format. You will have to keep in mind however that you may lose some of your formatting along the way, as the more recent versions of Word let you do things that the old version doesn’t.

One suggestion I have is that you might want to stick with Open Office. It’s a better product (in my humble opinion) than Word 97, at least, it’s much more recent and has better support.

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