Keeping stuff: How to preserve course papers despite technological change

Microsoft Office

Since the College made the transition to distributed computing, in 1999-2001, the dominant word-processing software on campus has been Microsoft Word, the dominant spreadsheet has been Microsoft Excel, and the dominant presentation manager has been Microsoft PowerPoint. We have now been through several versions of each of these products, each featuring a different user interface and a different set of undocumented, not-quite-compatible, proprietary file formats.

Consequently, most of the faculty members who have been here for ten years or more, and keep archives of their course materials, have a motley collection of Microsoft Office files in various formats, all of which Microsoft now considers obsolescent. In Office 2007, Microsoft switched file-format defaults in Office to its new, unstandardized, and utterly incompatible .docx, .xlsx, and .pptx formats, and plans to phase out support for the older formats.

Since the older formats have been reverse-engineered by implementers of free-software systems like OpenOffice.org, it is likely that conversion utilities will be available for a very long time; as we have seen, even antique and rarely-used software doesn't disappear if it's free software. On the other hand, people who use only Microsoft Word for text processing are likely to find it increasingly difficult to access and use their old documents, and increasingly likely that the rendering of those documents will be incorrect in some way. Even the fact that Microsoft Word provides its own fonts will cause trouble; they are proprietary fonts, the available selection changes over time, and Microsoft has a strong economic incentive to keep forcing its customers and their documents into new, incompatible versions every few years, in order to preserve its monopoly and to maximize profits.

Instead of switching from the Office 2003 file formats to the Office 2007 file formats, it would have been wise for the College to upgrade to the Open Document Formats (.odt for text documents, .ods for spreadsheets, .odp for presentations, and so on), which are standard and have now been consistently implemented in several different applications (OpenOffice.org, Google Docs, IBM Lotus Symphony, etc.), along with converters that can read in Microsoft Word documents of various vintages and write out .odt documents. People who went along with the bad decision to become customers of Microsoft may still have a fairly daunting conversion task, but at least they would be in a better position going forward. It's likely that the Open Document Formats are still somewhat unstable, but the economic incentives relating to compatibility with earlier versions are the opposite of those affecting Microsoft: Designers and implementers of future revisions of the Open Document standard have excellent reasons not to invalidate existing documents.