To allow users still relying on older versions of the productivity suite up to Office 2013 to edit new documents, the software giant shipped this Office Compatibility Pack that adds support for the new file formats.Īnd now it turns out that Microsoft is ready to pull this pack entirely, though no official announcement was released. While the company was using DOC, XLS, and PPT for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, respectively, in Office 2003, the very next update introduced a file format update to DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX. The Office Compatibility Pack was developed to allow users running old Office versions open documents that were created with newer versions of the productivity suite, as Microsoft changed file formats with the release of Office 2007. Microsoft has silently updated the official download page of the Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint file formats to state that the installer will be pulled next month.
