My Scientific American column this month concerned a sneaky problem that not many people are paying attention to: file-format rot. That’s when our digital files become unopenable not because their ...

You can open or import a surprising number of file formats into Microsoft Word. Not to be confused with file formatting, which—in most programs—refers to the design of a page, file formats are little ...

Microsoft changed Word’s format with version 2007, adding new features that some people find useful. But in doing so, they broke compatibility with an industry-wide standard. Fortunately, the company ...