Changing Technology

Contributed by Chris Utley, President
Geeks Of Nevada, Inc.

“The only thing that is constant in life is change”. In the technology field, that change often comes more quickly than most people want, but it is necessary to go with that change whether we want to or not.
We recently worked on a system with the Windows 98 on it. My bench technician who has been working in the industry for the last five years needed some coaching on how to drive the 13 year old computer. Our customer had been putting off buying the new machine because he did not want to have to learn a whole new operating system, but I had to let him know that the rest of the world had moved past his machine and there was no choice.

We also had a customer that recently asked us to send them a Microsoft Word® document in the old format because they could not read the new DOCX file extension that Microsoft Word® 2007 and 2010. They had not made the transition to the new suite because of the licensing requirement to run in a terminal server environment, so they simply asked the document author to save the file in the old format. Not a problem…the new software will save the document in a backwards compatible format, but there is another solution.

Microsoft® knew that there were going to be users that would not migrate to the new versions of the software and they didn’t want to leave those users completely out of the loop yet. I am sure there will come a point where the decision is made, that the older software will not be able to read the formats, but there is a solution that those users can use at the current time.

Microsoft® currently offers a free download of the MS Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel and PowerPoint file formats, which can be located by click here. This download will install on any Windows based system and run in the background when using any of these programs. When the user attempts to open one of the new formats, the software will automatically convert the document into one of the original formats that can be read by your current software. It will also allow you to go in and edit those documents, but you need to make sure that you save the document in the new format if you would like to go back to it in the future.

For other great solutions on navigating through the world of technology, please contact Geeks of Nevada at 775-841-7118 to develop strategies to achieve your needs.

Visit our web site at http://nevadageek.net
Follow us on Twitter at @nevadageek

Find out more about the Business Achievement Center at our web site http://www.BusinessAchievementCenter.com. Our group of Strategic Partners are here to help businesses from start-up to expansion with our experience and expertise.