Last week we ran into a problem when my husband, using his laptop with Vista with Word 2007 tried to send a document to someone who didn’t have Word 2007.

Word 2007 automatically saves documents with a .docx extension. Unfortunately no one with earlier versions of Word can open these documents. Microsoft Word has a fix you can download if you want to open a document from someone else:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word/HA100444731033.aspx

Here are instructions to help open the .docx items if you aren’t a Microsoft user:
http://www.ghacks.net/2007/07/25/how-do-i-open-docx-files/

What we found was an even better fix if you wanted to make it easier for someone to open was to save it with a .doc extension.