This isn't a reader question, it's a news item, but it has been raised by the Office Watch newsletter in Office 2003 Service Pack 3 - yes or no?. OW says:
SP3 is full of blatant Microsoft cost-cutting measures. Instead of making Office 2003 more secure and fully functional the company chose to block existing Office 2003 features that would have been too expensive for them to fix. It's cheaper for Microsoft to disable a feature instead of making it work properly.
The file types blocked by Service Pack 3 include:
* All Word documents created before (but not including) Word 6 for Windows. The includes all Word 1 and Word 2 documents, Word 4 for Mac plus early versions of Word for some Asian countries. * All Powerpoint files created before Powerpoint 97. * Excel 4 binary files in .xlc format. * dBase II files - the once very common .dbf format. * Lotus and Quattro files .wk1, .wk4, .wj3, wk1 FMT, .wks, .wk3, wk3, FM3, .wj2, .wq1, .fm3, .wj1 * Corel Draw .cdr
You may not care, of course. However, you may have old files that you still want to read, in which case you will care a lot.
I suspect there is also a hidden message that is not picked up by OW: you should be moving to Office 2007 and converting old files to Office Open XML formats.....
