What is the best Word format to save to?

Question

What is the best Word format to save to?

Help.

I have been using my Macbook Pro for about 5 years in an office setting, where everyone else in our business uses PC.

I use Parallels and run Windows 7.

However, I write almost every document in Pages, Version 5.1, and I run OS X Version 10.9.2

My problem is that I export my Pages document to Word, then I drag it over to Parallels Desktop and open it in Word to clean up any alignment and formattting issues.

There are two options in Pages, save to Word .doc (Word 1997-2004 compatible) or docx

Almost always when I email the Word document, the recepient complains that the formatting is off in some way.

Can anyone offer any advice?

Is one format better than the other, in terms of .doc or .docx, and/or is there something else I need to alter as I save the document to Word?

Thanks,

Dan

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.5.8)

Posted on Mar 18, 2014 1:23 PM

Reply

Answer 1

fruhulda

Level 6

15,161 points

Mar 18, 2014 1:39 PM in response to troyrecreation

Best is to use MS Office ad the formatting will always be a bit off as the converstion isn't perfect. You could try using LibrOffice to clean the document in, there might still be things that are a bit off.

Reply

Answer 2

Mar 18, 2014 1:43 PM in response to troyrecreation

Save to .docx, but as fruhulda says it is not perfect.

Even less so with Pages 5.

Peter

Reply

Answer 3

Mar 18, 2014 6:27 PM in response to troyrecreation

Either use compatible MS Office installation in your Windows 7 VM, or install Office for Mac 2011. In either case, you will not need to deal with time costly translations/fix-ups, and peer workflow disruptions, as you will always be working in the native document format.

The default document format in either scenario will be .docx. You would use .doc or .rtf if any recipient was still using a pre-2007 office implementation.

Reply