Diane, I appreciate your responding to my message, especially in light of the fact that what is completely missing here is any response by any Microsoft employees / representatives to these posts.
I don't really understand how your post applies more than tangentially to my note, however. You wrote about versions of Entourage identities not being compatible, which makes enough sense. My note about being aghast at the lack of backward compatibility was about basic and globally utilized file formats for Word and Excel documents, not Entourage identities (the problem with Entourage is Microsoft's failure to proactively address the fact that the whole reason we all love an integrated app like Entourage is that it allows us to use the app and our portable devices to keep our lives organized - the "sync with iCal and address book" path is an absurd abdication of responsibility to the customer).
The fact that these programs used worldwide now produce by default files that cannot be read by Office users who have not migrated to 2007 (PC) or 2008 (Mac) is unconscionable. The options appear to be (1) to make recipients of the docs download the converter (which my clients in big corporations will not be allowed to do themselves - it's up to the IT departments to make the decision and install the converter, which will take months at a minimum to happen across the business world) or (2) remember to save the files down every time before sending them. The second option, in my tests, worked for Word and Powerpoint, but not for Excel, which may be the issue the original poster in this thread was getting at.
I hate to sound like I'm ranting, but after way too many hours trying to deal with these migration issues I really wonder how and why Microsoft released this program with such fundamental flaws (those discussed here and across these boards). The focus on making things look pretty while ignoring some critical functionality is really baffling to me.
In the odd chance someone from Microsoft reads this post, please remind the people around you at work that the reason we use the Mac is because "It just works." If you would keep that in mind when developing software, you might have happy customers instead of people who buy and use your software only because they have to in order to interface with the more dominant PC world.
I was in disbelief reading the post that Mac office files are not backward compatible
Entourage Identities are not backwards compatible. Even in the same version
some updates change the database and you must update Entourage to the
current version if you re-install to be able to use your Identity.
"This Identity Cannot Be Opened With This Version of Entourage"
This message usually means, for example, that Entourage is at 11.0, but the
saved database was saved in Entourage 11.3.3. Since there was a database
format change in there, Entourage 11.0 cannot open a database saved in
Entourage 11.3.3.
Microsoft does not update each application every time an update is released.
See ³Confused over Microsoft Update Version numbers?³ for a handy script
that gives you the Office application¹s version info.
