Sorry, but you are mixing up apples and oranges. The formats of which you speak are part of the Office 2007 suite. These are applications, which are completely separate from the operating system. Most Windows XP users I know are currently running Office 2007, and you can run older versions of Office under Vista. Don't forget, that they make Office 2008 for the Mac users, which uses the same new formats.TubaTodd wrote: With all due respect, no, Vista's plethora of problems did not stem from that "type of advice." Vista was a culmination of ideas to provide users something "new" that they would ultimately be "forced" into buying due to a) change in format [ie .docx, .xlsx, etc] or b) discontinued support of a previous product. Of course instead of taking a page out of Apple's book, producing a highly polished, highly refined and well thought out product (I'm NOT saying it is perfect) for each release, Microsoft decided "let's change this..oh and that...and let's change the kernel in such a way that it causes all kinds of hardware compatibility issues.
Do I like Office 2007? Absolutely not. It is bloatware to the extreme. However, I eventually had to adopt it several months ago, out of necessity, when the converters for previous version of office just weren't cutting it.
Back on topic, I like Windows 7. I think that it is what Vista should have been in the first place. Hopefully they will do a similar overhaul with the next version of Office.