Gadgetory

thanks for watching tech quickie click the subscribe button and enable notifications with the bell icon so you won't miss any future videos so do you know those little three or four letter suffixes at the end of file names after the dot they're called file extensions and they'll let you and other programs know what kind of file you're dealing with whether it's a movie a song or a love letter and for a very long time whenever you saved a Microsoft Word document you see that the program would slap a dot docx extension onto it which made a lot of sense right doc for document but recently you may have noticed that your files now have a dot X extension so YX is a four extreme to make words sound more exciting than the mere word processor or as Microsoft just trying to tell you that if you need a nice-looking document docx going to give it to you well in a way the answer to that second question is actually yes you see the old doc standard was a proprietary format me that it was designed only to be read properly by ms word doc offered many more features to the plain text documents that could be read by virtually any PC such as the ability to embed comments insert images and use footnotes just to name a few but this also meant that these features had to be encoded in a way that could be read by your word processor and because Microsoft didn't open the standard so that non microsoft programs could read them with 100% accuracy they often don't look quite right if you try to open them in for example LibreOffice writer Google Docs or apples pages and depending on what ms word feature the original file utilized they sometimes ended up looking like a complete mess in fact support for the doc format was even pulls from WordPad the free word processor bundled with Microsoft's own Windows operating system partly because it had a hard time rendering these files properly doc X on the other hand is an open standard meaning that it's available for other programs to fully implement so if you start working on the report in Word and later want to collaborate on it in real time in Google Docs your browser-based copies should play nicely with the original file so the X in docx actually stands for X ml a markup language that's superficially similar to HTML the code that defines how a web page is supposed to look on your screen now since XML is also an open standard that's much more streamlined to the old docx format and not only provides the benefit of greater compatibility but it's simpler structure makes it a more difficult target from malware less susceptible to file errors and easier for your computer to process meaning improved loading times and better responsiveness if you're trying to work with a complicated document so it was all of these advantages along with some gentle nudging from government regulators who were concerned about their market power which led Microsoft which by the way is a company that's notorious for his preference for closed standards to make the switch to docx starting with office 2007 making our home in office pcs more compatible than ever before though some industry players still saw this move as Microsoft inappropriately trying to influence open standards bodies man portal Microsoft just can't catch a break Andy well however you feel about the company the docx format proves useful and is now a mainstay on modern versions of word with the features we mentioned also extending to the format's now used by other office programs such as Excel and PowerPoint complete with the X at the end of the file name to let you know that you're using the new standards collectively call it office open XML just don't count on that making your all-nighters more exciting because you put off a term paper for three months and speaking of putting things off are you racing against the clock as a freelancer it's challenging but with the growth the internet there's never been more opportunities for the self-employed to meet this need check out fresh books cloud accounting software designed for the way that you work it's the simplest and easiest way to be more productive organized and most importantly get paid quickly create and send professional-looking invoices in less than 30 seconds setup online payments with just a couple of clicks and get paid up to four days faster and you can even see when your client has seen your invoice meaning no more guessing games and right now FreshBooks is offering a 30-day unrestricted free trial to our viewers to claim it just go to FreshBooks comm slash tech wiki and enter tech quickie indie how did you hear about this section so thanks for watching guys you know what to do by now like dislike comment with video suggestions check out our other channels and don't forget to hit subscribe