Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack

~ the obituary ~

The compatibility pack entered my life the way it entered everyone's, which is that somebody sent me a file with an x on the end of it and my copy of Office had no idea what to do. That was around 2007 in Turkey, university years, and the installed base around me was Office 2003 or older on machines nobody was going to replace on Microsoft's schedule. The fix was a link, a 26 megabyte download, and then the file opened and you forgot the whole thing had happened.

Office 2007 changed the file formats down to the bytes, from a binary blob to a zip archive full of XML, which is why .doc became .docx and .xls became .xlsx. Microsoft had done a format break before, in Office 97, and had learned exactly how much damage one causes. So this time the break shipped with a bridge attached.

The Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint File Formats was released on 6 November 2006, before Office 2007 reached retail. Install it on Office 2003 or on either of the two versions before it, and that copy could open the new formats, edit them and save back into them. The full round trip, on a suite that had shipped years before the format it was now writing existed.

That is the reason the transition worked at all. An organization with four thousand desktops on Office 2003 did not have to buy four thousand upgrades in the same quarter that its suppliers started sending .docx invoices. It had to deploy one free package. Microsoft got its format adopted and its customers got to keep their deployment schedules, and both of those things happened because of a download nobody ever thought about twice.

~ the case file ~

~ twenty million against thirty two thousand ~

On 20 December 2007 a Microsoft product manager named Gray Knowlton posted the number. In its first twelve months the compatibility pack had been downloaded more than twenty million times. He was careful to point out that this undercounts badly, because an IT department downloads it once and then pushes it onto thousands of machines, so the install figure is some unknown multiple of the download figure.

He then did something less careful, which was to put that number next to the ODF Translator, the open-source plug-in that taught Office to read OpenDocument files. Asked in his own comments for the figure, he gave it: just under 400,000 downloads for everything in the project, of which the Excel translator specifically accounted for about 32,000. This was the middle of the standards fight over whether OOXML deserved ISO ratification, and Knowlton was using adoption numbers as an argument in it while saying he had no view on ODF either way.

~ the download microsoft would not push ~

The interesting decision inside the compatibility pack is that it was never automatic. Microsoft could have shipped it through Windows Update to every machine running an older Office and reached everybody overnight. It chose not to, and Knowlton wrote that the choice had been argued about internally at length.

The argument on one side was from IT organizations who wanted it pushed so they would stop fielding calls about unopenable attachments. On the other side were people who would have read a silent push of a new file format onto their machines as Microsoft forcing OOXML into an environment that had not asked for it. Microsoft went with manual, which meant every single one of those twenty million installs was somebody making a decision. That is also why Windows started offering to search the web for a program when you double-clicked a .docx it could not handle, because the search led to the download page.

~ the retirement notice ~

On 16 November 2017 a post went up on the Office sustained engineering blog and killed four things in its opening sentence. The Excel Viewer, the PowerPoint Viewer, the PowerPoint 2007 Viewer and the Office Compatibility Pack would all be retired in April 2018, no longer available for download and no longer receiving security updates. Its last line mentions that the Word Viewer was going that same month, as previously announced.

The replacements it offered were mobile apps from the Windows Store, iOS and Android versions, a free trial of Office 365, or uploading the file to OneDrive and reading it in a browser. Every one of those answers assumes an internet connection and most assume an account. The retired download assumed a machine. The date landed on 30 April 2018, which means an add-in written for Office 2000 outlived the Windows versions that Office 2000 ran on and kept doing its one job for eleven and a half years.

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