Forced upgrades?

Posted Feb 23, 2012 19:23 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313)
In reply to: Forced upgrades? by khim
Parent article: Changes and complaints

> The superstrongly enforced upgrades in the Linux desktop world are the very core of the issue under discussion! It's easy to don't like ribbon interface, but you have literally years to make yourself accustomed with it (MS Office 2003, 2007 and 2010 happily coexist in one system)

except for the fact that once anyone you deal with upgrades to MS Office X, they start sending you documents in the new default format for that version, and so you had better upgrade to it now if you want to be able to read and manipulate the documents that they send you.

Forced upgrades?

Posted Feb 23, 2012 21:08 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

except for the fact that once anyone you deal with upgrades to MS Office X, they start sending you documents in the new default format for that version, and so you had better upgrade to it now if you want to be able to read and manipulate the documents that they send you.

Nope, you don't need to do that.

Link to beta version is long gone, but released version of compatibility pack is still there.

It's not perfect and sure, new features will not be available to you but it covers 99.99% of important cases.

It's not uncommon for the large company to spend year to just develop an upgrade strategy! Upgrade itself may take two, three or five more years. And not everything is upgraded at once: company may decide to switch to MS Office 2007 and keep MS Visual Studio 2005. Or it may decide to keep MS Office 2003 and switch to MS Visual Studio 2008. Not something you can [easily] do in Linux world.