The users of one of the companies that I manage (I.T.) send a lot of e-mails with MS Word/Excel attachments. A while ago, they decided to ignore my protests and upgrade to Office 2007; aside from the fact that Office 2007 sucks, this created a rather annoying *issue* for them whenever they sent a Word or Excel attachment via e-mail—about half of their recipients couldn’t open the attachments. This is a rather easy problem to deal with so I didn’t pay it much attention in the beginning… actually it’s not a problem at all, the software is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do: Force people (i.e., the recipients) to believe that they have no choice but to upgrade when in fact, they don’t. If this weren’t the case, then why wasn’t the Office 2007 Compatibility Pack included in the latest Office 2003 service pack (which was released September 18, 2007; eight months AFTER Office 2007 was released for retail on January 30, 2007)? But I digress… I could be here all day griping about Microsoft’s shady business practices. So anyway, in the beginning, I told the users to tell their recipients that they needed to install the aforementioned compatibility pack, I even gave them the direct link to the download. I also told them that as an alternative, they could save their documents in Word or Excel 2003 format. Both of these options proved to be too much for them (or their customers) to handle, and since I’m the I.T. guy I’m expected to “just make it work”. It’s ok, that’s what I get paid to do, so what did I do? Rather than travel to three different locations and make changes that would be reversed either at random, by the users, or by an update; I inserted the following lines in their login script(s):

Option Explicit
'Set word and excel 2007 default save formats
Dim objShell
Set objShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
objShell.RegWrite _
"HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Word\Options\DefaultFormat", "Doc", "REG_SZ"
objShell.RegWrite _
"HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Excel\Options\DefaultFormat", "56", "REG_DWORD"

They only have about three different login scripts for the entire domain so this wasn’t too hard, I didn’t even have to leave the office :-)

This changes a user’s default Word and Excel save formats to the Office 2003/XP format. If you put this in a login script, it will be run every time the user logs in (thus, changing the setting). This is exactly how Office 2007 changes this setting so there’s really no harm in setting it every time a user logs in. Also, running it automatically upon login prevents users from changing this setting permanently because it will be reset once they login (after shutting down for the evening or logging out for example).

Now I must admit, a part of me feels dirty for doing this. A part of me wanted to tell them that their only options (aside from telling their customers to upgrade) were the two that I already gave them (which, if it weren’t for my little addition to their login scripts, would be very true). I wanted to lecture them on why they shouldn’t be using proprietary software (and paying through the nose) for things that could be accomplished just as well, if not better, using free software. I wanted them to understand that this is what happens when your business depends on proprietary software–you become the manufacturer’s prisoner.

However, if I had attempted any of these, I would be less one client and they would have just found someone else to prolong their suffering–at least this way I get to keep my client.

I’m sharing this experience in the hope that if we spread this around, we can stifle the proliferation of OOXML formatted documents (I know it’s hopeless, but you can’t say I didn’t try).

If you’d like to know more about why it’s bad to send Word/Excel/Powerpoint/etc attachments, click here.