About opening and saving in other file formats

Word uses file format converters to open and save documents in different formats. The most commonly used converters are installed with Word by default— unless you or your administrator choose to make them unavailable on your computer.

If you want to convert a document to a different format so that you or someone else can open it in another program or in an earlier version of Word, you can select that file format when you save the document.

If you want to open or save in a format that's not installed by default, you may need to install additional converters.

The converters that come with Office Word 2003 allow you to do one or all of the following:

• Open a file that was created in another program.
• Save a file so that it can be opened in another program.
• Open a Office Word 2003 document in another program.

Word can open and save files in many formats apart from its default format (.doc), without the use of a converter.

Formats Word can open directly

.doc

The default Word document format.

.dot

Word template format.

.htm, .html

Web page in HTML format.

.mht, .mhtml

Web page in single file Web page (also known as Web archive) format.

.xml

Extensible Markup Language (XML) format.

.rtf

Rich Text Format (RTF); contains formatting instructions that other programs, including compatible Microsoft programs, can read and interpret.

.txt

Plain text format: contains no text formatting.

Formats Word can save directly

.doc

The default Word document format.

.dot

Word template format. Word applies all formatting and other attributes in the template to any new document based on the template.

.htm, .html

Web page in HTML format. Preserves Word document properties so that HTML documents retain Word-specific features if they are later saved back to Word document format.

Note  You can also save a document in a filtered HTML format that removes the Word-specific HTML encoding (Web Page, Filtered).

.mht, .mhtml

Web page in single file Web page (also known as Web archive) format.

.xml

Extensible Markup Language file.

.rtf

Rich Text Format; converts formatting to instructions that other programs, including compatible Microsoft programs, can read and interpret.

.txt

Plain text format; contains no text formatting. Converts all section breaks, page breaks, and new line characters to paragraph marks. Allows you to select the ANSI character set or to use the encoding standard that you choose. Use an encoded format when you share documents with people who use system software in another language.

If you always save documents in a different format— for example, if you need to share all the documents you create with co-workers who are using a previous version of Microsoft Word— you can change the default file format Word uses to save new documents (Tools menu, Options command, Save tab). This setting affects only new documents you create. Word saves existing documents in the same format they were opened in.