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notifications with the bell icon so you won't miss any future videos so do you
know those little three or four letter suffixes at the end of file names after
the dot they're called file extensions and they let you and other programs know
what kind of file you're dealing with whether it's a movie a song or a
love letter and for a very long time whenever you
save the microsoft word document you see that the program would slap a dot doc
extension onto it which made a lot of sense right doc for document but
recently you may have noticed that your files now have a docx extension so why x
is it for extreme to make word sound more exciting than the mirror word
processor or is microsoft just trying to tell you that if you need a nice looking
document docx gonna give it to you
well in a way the answer to that second question is actually
yes you see the old doc standard was a
proprietary format me that it was designed only to be read properly by ms
word doc offered many more features than the plain text documents that could be
read by virtually any pc such as the ability to embed comments insert images
and use footnotes just to name a few but this also meant that these features had
to be encoded in a way that could be read by your word processor and because
microsoft didn't open the standard so that non-microsoft programs could read
them with 100 accuracy they often don't look quite right if you try to open them
in for example libreoffice writer google docs or apple's pages and depending on
what ms word feature the original file utilized they sometimes ended up looking
like a complete mess in fact support for the doc format was
even pulled from wardpad the freeward processor bundled with microsoft's own
Windows operating system partly because it had a hard time rendering these files
properly docx on the other hand is an open
standard meaning that it's available for other programs to fully implement so if
you start working on the report in word and later when we collaborate on it in
real time in google docs your browser-based copy should play nicely
with the original file so the x in docx
actually stands for xml a markup language that's superficially similar to
html the code that defines how a web page is supposed to look on your screen
now since xml is also an open standard that's much more streamlined than the
old dock format it not only provides the benefit of greater compatibility but its
simpler structure makes it a more difficult target for malware less
susceptible to file errors and easier for your computer to process meaning
improved loading times and better responsiveness if you're trying to work
with a complicated document so it was all of these advantages along with some
gentle nudging from government regulators who were concerned about their market power which led microsoft
which by the way is a company that's notorious for its preference for closed
standards to make the switch to docx starting with office 2007 making our
home and office pcs more compatible than ever before
though some industry players still solve this move as microsoft inappropriately
tried to influence open standards bodies man plural microsoft just can't catch a
break can they well however you feel about the company
the docx format proved useful and is now a mainstay on modern versions of word
with the features we mentioned also extending to the formats now used by
other office programs such as excel and powerpoint complete with the x at the
end of the file name to let you know that you're using the new standards collectively called office open xml just
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