 Welcome to Producing Backward Compatible Word Documents. In Word 2007 for Windows, click on the Office button in the upper left. Click the Word Options button. This is the Word Options dialog box. Click Save in the left pane. By default, Word 2007 saves documents in the DOCX format, incompatible with all previous versions of Word. The DOC format is much more compatible across various versions of Word. Click OK. Your Word documents will now be more compatible with other versions. This is the Preferences dialog box for Word 2008 for Mac. In the Output and Sharing section, click on the Save icon. Click the Save Word Files as drop-down. Select Word 97 to 2004 document. Click OK and you're done.