A bunch of Numbers…

Today I had an amusing adventure in software compatibility. I was sent a file to put on the private site I manage in the new Office 2007 Excel Open XML format (.xlsx). It was also sent to a number of other folks in the organization via email.
Naturally enough none of us could open it. 🙂
Now I have Office for Mac 2004 at home and it’s been fine up until now for everything that’s been thrown at me but it doesn’t appear there’s a software compatibility pack that covers Excel files yet. I do believe that Word and PowerPoint are covered, but that’s not what I needed.
As it turns out Office 2003 for XP does have a compatibility pack that will do a conversion and I do have a copy of 2003 on my Back Pack XP partition so all was well and good. But…
To be honest, and I mentioned this in an earlier post, I haven’t decided to upgrade Office yet. I’m not sure I really need to keep going down the Office path and had been giving some thought to iWork. I use Office at the office and I don’t expect that’s really ever going to change. But for home use, and I never bring work home, it’s overkill. So…
As I was out and about I stopped at my local Apple Store (Ala Moana) and opened up the webmail account on which I’d gotten the .xlsx file. I opened with Numbers from iWork and lo and behold, it converted with just a warning or two a bit of difference in the formatting. It was good enough to use for posting on the site.
I liked it enough that I downloaded the trial iWork package from Apple and plan on giving it a go. Hopefully OpenOffice will also come through with conversion and…maybe even Google Apps!
Later I gave the conversion pack for Office 2003 and that worked too – kinda boring though.
Aloha!