DOC vs. DOCX Explained
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2018-05-06
·
874 words · ~4 min read
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thanks for watching techwiki click the subscribe button then enable
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notifications with the bell icon so you won't miss any future videos so do you
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know those little three or four letter suffixes at the end of file names after
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the dot they're called file extensions and they let you and other programs know
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what kind of file you're dealing with whether it's a movie a song or a
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love letter and for a very long time whenever you
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save the microsoft word document you see that the program would slap a dot doc
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extension onto it which made a lot of sense right doc for document but
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recently you may have noticed that your files now have a docx extension so why x
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is it for extreme to make word sound more exciting than the mirror word
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processor or is microsoft just trying to tell you that if you need a nice looking
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document docx gonna give it to you
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well in a way the answer to that second question is actually
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yes you see the old doc standard was a
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proprietary format me that it was designed only to be read properly by ms
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word doc offered many more features than the plain text documents that could be
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read by virtually any pc such as the ability to embed comments insert images
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and use footnotes just to name a few but this also meant that these features had
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to be encoded in a way that could be read by your word processor and because
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microsoft didn't open the standard so that non-microsoft programs could read
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them with 100 accuracy they often don't look quite right if you try to open them
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in for example libreoffice writer google docs or apple's pages and depending on
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what ms word feature the original file utilized they sometimes ended up looking
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like a complete mess in fact support for the doc format was
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even pulled from wardpad the freeward processor bundled with microsoft's own
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Windows operating system partly because it had a hard time rendering these files
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properly docx on the other hand is an open
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standard meaning that it's available for other programs to fully implement so if
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you start working on the report in word and later when we collaborate on it in
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real time in google docs your browser-based copy should play nicely
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with the original file so the x in docx
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actually stands for xml a markup language that's superficially similar to
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html the code that defines how a web page is supposed to look on your screen
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now since xml is also an open standard that's much more streamlined than the
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old dock format it not only provides the benefit of greater compatibility but its
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simpler structure makes it a more difficult target for malware less
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susceptible to file errors and easier for your computer to process meaning
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improved loading times and better responsiveness if you're trying to work
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with a complicated document so it was all of these advantages along with some
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gentle nudging from government regulators who were concerned about their market power which led microsoft
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which by the way is a company that's notorious for its preference for closed
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standards to make the switch to docx starting with office 2007 making our
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home and office pcs more compatible than ever before
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though some industry players still solve this move as microsoft inappropriately
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tried to influence open standards bodies man plural microsoft just can't catch a
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break can they well however you feel about the company
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the docx format proved useful and is now a mainstay on modern versions of word
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with the features we mentioned also extending to the formats now used by
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other office programs such as excel and powerpoint complete with the x at the
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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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don't count on making your all-nighters more exciting because you put off a term
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