Use of Microsoft Office versions
Dear Mr Kaelin, you should have asked for Office 2000 or later to obtain a more realistic result. In my experience, only very few folks still use Office 1997 or Office 1995 and they are not the kind of customers going for Google apps.
Most business relations I am working with do not consider to abandon their running Office systems once Microsoft comes up with new versions. None of them is anything but happy if new hardware comes with new software forcing them to work with newer Microsoft stuff - they consider the three year cycle for new Office versions as some kind of strange rip-off solely for the benefit of the software industry and act accordingly.
For Office versions from before 2007, Microsoft has published a conversion tool allowing to use more modern file versions and will seriously damage its own business when giving up downward compatibility for its products. Nobody interested in a sensible market share will nowadays impose on customers what happened when IBM shelved its proprietary word processor more than 20 years ago forcing customers to convert their then rather small electronic archives to a format the replacing software would support. I have strange experiences with MS Word files with word processors they were not mad with in the first place - in particular when several people where editing them before they came to me.
We therefore have a policy not to use Office formats for files sent to third parties for further processing, but to use RTF instead. Up until today, that has never caused any problems regardless of the word processor in use and if RTF eventually does not support a specific Word feature, this is not the end of the world and can be dealt with in another way.
