One Area Where Microsoft's Standard Is a Good Thing

When it comes to word processing on the Mac, Microsoft Word has long been the standard. There have always been other applications available, but many people have never bothered to check around, instead just going with Word, assuming it will be the most compatible of the various applications available.

And that's probably true.

Ever since Word 97 for Windows and Word 98 for Mac, Microsoft Word versions have shared a common format. This really makes it easy to share documents with other people or use documents on two computers that have different versions of Word installed.

This was a great improvement over previous versions of Word, which only allowed you to open documents created in the same version of the application or import one from a previous version. If you had a Word 6 document and wanted to open it in Word 5, you would have to export it using Word 6, saving it so that it would be compatible with Word 5.

Forgot to do that? Then it won't open properly.

It gets worse. If you open a Word 5 document in Word 6 and save it, it will ask you if you want to update it to Word 6 format. If you're not paying attention and click yes, you won't be able to use it in Word 5 again unless you export if using 6. It's the same for Word 5 and 6 documents being opened in Word 98, 2001, or v. X.

Then there's AppleWorks, although it suffers from the same issues that plagued Word 5 and 6. The only good point here is that AppleWorks 6 has been out for so long, that very few people are likely to be using 5 or before anymore. But if you do run into someone still using version 5, they won't be able to open a document you created in version 6.

If Apple does decide to update it again (it's been something like four years since version 6.0 came out), I hope they don't alter the format. Many people who share documents with other 6.0 users would have trouble dealing with the inconvenience. Schools that use 6.0 school-wide wouldn't be able to upgrade to the new version in, say, just the computer labs, because if the old version didn't open the new documents, productivity would be at a minimum. Many schools just can't afford to upgrade the software on all of their computers at once (although some are forced to if they buy a site-license).

Of course, the worst-case application was Symantec GreatWorks, a sort of ClarisWorks-style application that Apple provided with some Performas in the early 90s. GreatWorks could open it's own documents - and nothing else. It was so incompatible that it's no wonder it wasn't around for very long, being replaced by ClarisWorks as the word processor of choice in Apple's Performa software bundle.

More recently things have been getting more compatible. Perhaps the model application would be the ThinkFree Office suite. Unlike AppleWorks or old versions of Word, ThinkFree Office's format is fully compatible with Microsoft Office 97 format, the format that the majority of the world is using.

People have said standards like this can be a bad thing, because they can reduce competition, but this proves that wrong. ThinkFree Office provides competition to Microsoft Office (although most people don't even know about it) and still retains the compatibility that is so necessary these days.

In the age where emailing documents is common, application formats need to be consistent. As nice as it is to have a variety of applications to choose from for word processing (and I've heard an experimental version of AbiWord is to be released for OS X), the formats shouldn't be incompatible.