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Office 2007 comes to Windows Mobile - at last

Microsoft updates their PDA range to support Office 2007 documents – and not before time.

At long last, Microsoft has made some of their Windows Mobile (aka Pocket PC) devices compatible with Office 2007 documents (.docx xlsx pptx etc.) – Windows Mobile 6.1 is now available.

It’s been a year since Office 2007 was available so you could hardly accuse Microsoft of speedy deployment for their own technology. Office for Mac users still don’t have any proper conversion tools – just a lame docx converter.

Microsoft continues its push to have the Office 2007 document formats recognized as a global standard, but that push isn’t helped by the delays in implementing the new formats ‘in-house’.

Some Windows Mobile v5 devices and all Windows Mobile v6 devices that have Office Mobile as well can get a free upgrade which has reasonable support for Office 2007 document formats.

If you don’t have Office Mobile installed on the compatible device you’ll have to pay around US$50 for it. Old’ Pocket PC’s and Windows Mobile devices aren’t supported for this upgrade.

Of course, you don’t get all the features of Office 2007 on a tiny, tiny little screen – but you can open, view and do basic editing of documents, worksheets and presentations.

As a bonus, the update includes the ability to open and view ZIP files which is a side-benefit of the Office 2007 documents (which are ZIP files in disguise).

There are a few disclosed quirks – Powerpoint files with Information Rights Management enabled will open slowly. Excel 2003 files with charts using ‘data as values’ won’t work, they need to be changed to ‘Data by reference’ or, presumably saved to Excel 2007 format.

The Microsoft FAQ is here.

Or start the download process from here

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