It’s always the same deal - somebody in your group is using Office 2007 while everybody uses older versions of Office or vice versa,  and then you get people not being able to read other people’s documents, presentations and spreadsheets. It’s a mess every single time with every single group.

There are few ways to get around that, which for some reason many people don’t know about. For one, you’ve got the different Office versions readers. So, there’s a viewer for Word 2007, Powerpoint 2007 etc., but it doesn’t allow us to do much more than just view the documents. If you still need to collaborate with others using 2007 while you’re using 2003, either have them save the files in a file format your Office version can read, or - simply install the “Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats” which would allow your older 2000, XP and 2003 versions of Office to open the new X standard document files of the new Office 2007.

About that from Microsoft:

A compatibility pack is available to make sure that you can open and save Office Open XML Formats in earlier versions of Microsoft Office. You can install the compatibility pack on a computer that is running Microsoft Office 2003 programs, Microsoft Office XP programs, or Microsoft Office 2000 programs. When you install the compatibility pack, you can open, edit, save, and create files in the robust Office Open XML Formats.

Yeah, surprisingly, it works.