How to Convert .DOCX files to regular Word .DOC documents

by Oscar Sodani

September 25, 2008

Oscar Sodani is a founder of Help2Go and owner of Help2Go Networks, an IT consulting firm in the Washington D.C. area. Oscar holds the CISSP certification as well as industry certifications from Microsoft, Cisco and Novell.

Microsoft has quite the scam going. Every few years, they change their proprietary document format, .DOC, so that people need to purchase the new version of Word to open the files. Clever. This year was no different - I bet you have received an attachment with a .DOCX extension and wondered what the heck it was. We'll show you how to convert that .DOCX file to a regular Microsoft Word .DOC document that you can open in Word, Pages, Google Docs, or whatever you use as your word processor.

To do this, we rely on a nifty new website called Zamzar. Zamzar allows you to upload your .DOCX file and download the converted .DOC file. It's fast and free.

Steps to convert .DOCX to .DOC

Go to http://www.zamzar.com/
Browse for your file on your hard drive
Choose to convert to .doc
Enter your email address - this is where a link to your file will be sent.

OR: Open .DOCX with previous versions of MS Office

Alternatively, we can install a compatibility pack onto your existing version of Microsoft Office that will allow you to open and save .DOCX files with older versions. Just go to Microsoft's web site to download the pack and install it on your computer (PC-only).

That's it - happy converting!

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