Word 2007 - unable to change default document save format

[John Gray]

A friend of mine has a laptop running Vista and Office 2007, who says that people complain to her because "they can't read the documents I send them", presumably because of the default .DOCX. I have given her the instructions about how to change the default Save format to Word97-2003 .DOC, but she says that it won't let her because she has to be an Administrator.

I haven't heard of this problem before, but wonder if anyone has any suggestions about how to overcome this. Further information is that she is not very computer literate, and lives over 100 miles away, at the end of a very long line from the local exchange, so gets about 500 Kbps, which doesn't really allow for remote controlling...

[HansV]

If she right-clicks the shortcut to Microsoft Word, does she have an option "Run as Administrator" in the context menu? If so, she can try that.
Otherwise, she'll have to get used to select Word 97-2003 format each time she saves a new document.

BTW, I'd have thought that by now, all users of Office 2000, 2002/XP and 2003 would have installed the free Compatibility Pack that allows users of these versions to open, edit and save Word documents, Excel workbooks and PowerPoint presentations in the new formats.

[John Gray]

BTW, I'd have thought that by now, all users of Office 2000, 2002/XP and 2003 would have installed the free Compatibility Pack that allows users of these versions to open, edit and save Word documents, Excel workbooks and PowerPoint presentations in the new formats.

Thanks for that suggestion! It looks like the answer.

Yes, you would think that people should have come across the File Format Converters / Compatibility Pack, but at work I still hear about problems at other places where yet other people have sent DOCX, XLSX, etc. files to the bafflement of the recipient!

[BobSullivan]

I have encountered a situation like you describe, but in the opposite manner. When people were changing from 2003 to 2007, they were setting the default save option to 2003. We discovered that after this initial installation, a person could go in and change it to the default docx format, but Office would not preserve the change from one session to the next. As soon as you closed Word and re-opened it, it would go back to the previous setting.

To permanently change the default document save setting required a registry fix. Ugh! Unless a patch has been published in the last 4 years, anyway.

[kdock]

Hi Bob,

I have both Office 2007 and 2010 and what you described is not what I experienced. I opened Word (and this happened the same way in both versions), changed the default Save format, then saved a document to make sure it worked. I then closed Word and reopened to make sure the change stuck. It did. I then changed to the docx format. (Here there was a slight difference between 2007 and 2010. 2007 did it immediately, while 2010 asked me if I wanted to do this throughout Office 2010 where this format was recognized (I'm paraphrasing here). I said yes to the prompt in 2010.) Then I closed Word and opened. When I saved, it saved in the docx format. No manual registry change needed.

So it was either fixed or, if your computers are on a network, it's possible your settings were set through a user policy profile.

Best,
Kim

[stuck]

A friend of mine has a laptop running Vista and Office 2007, who says that people complain to her because "they can't read the documents I send them", presumably because of the default .DOCX. I have given her the instructions about how to change the default Save format to Word97-2003 .DOC, but she says that it won't let her because she has to be an Administrator.

That will just be Vista's over enthusiastic UAC sticking it's oar in.

If she knows the Admin password for her Vista machine (and if it's her laptop and she's the only user on it then she should ought to know it as my limited experience of Vista is that the UAC often requires you to enter the admin password) then all she has to do is type it in when the UAC pops up the password dialog box. However, if she doesn't know the password I'm not sure how you get round that one. Unless it's a company laptop, in which case the company IT people should know it.

Ken