Microsoft has quietly updated the official download page for the Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint file formats to indicate that the new installation will be released next month.
The Office suite was developed to allow users running older versions of Office to open documents created with newer versions of Office, as Microsoft changed file formats with the release of Office 2007.
While the company used DOC, XLS, and PPT for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, respectively, in Office 2003, the next update introduced a file format update to DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX. To allow users who still rely on older versions of Office up to Office 2013 to edit new documents, the software giant shipped this Office Compatibility Pack that adds support for the new file formats.
And now it turns out that Microsoft is ready to completely remove this package, although no official announcement has been made. As Woody Leonhard notes, everything will take place in April, at which point the package will no longer receive any further updates and security patches.
Microsoft does not offer any other details about this decision, and the download page only includes general information about the compatibility pack.
KB924074, which is the official documentation for the Office Compatibility Pack, does not include any further details about the end date, only the information users need to open new file formats in older versions of Microsoft Office. The page was last updated on January 8, 2017.
Most likely, Microsoft's decision is based on the fact that only a few customers still have the old versions of Office and a compatibility pack is no longer needed to add support for the new file formats.
