Comparing Doc and Docx formats

The Doc and Docx for­mats are used to write and store for­mat­ted text files. Being con­tainer­ized, they can con­tain not only the actu­al text, but also graph­ics, style sheets, and more. In addi­tion, both for­mats were devel­oped by Microsoft for use in office appli­ca­tions and suites.

To under­stand how these two types of doc­u­ment stor­age work, it is worth con­sid­er­ing a brief his­to­ry of text files:

1. TXT is the first ever way to save text. It, accord­ing­ly, sup­ports only text. Adding an image to it or, for exam­ple, bold­ing it will not work;

2. RTF is a for­mat that sup­ports for­mat­ting. In par­tic­u­lar, the words in it can be made bold, writ­ten in ital­ics, change the font, add images, and so on. At the same time, RTF is not able to work with styles, tables, and the gen­er­al pre­sen­ta­tion of the doc­u­ment is sim­i­lar to that in the first ver­sions of HTML;

3. DOC is a for­mat that sup­ports cas­cad­ing styles, for­mat­ting, insert­ing tables, sheet lay­out, and more. The struc­ture is sim­i­lar to the third and fourth ver­sions of HTML;

4. DOCX is a con­tain­er for­mat that sup­ports, in gen­er­al, every­thing that DOC can do, but has a ZIP archive struc­ture with sep­a­rate descrip­tions of markup, images, and XML text. In addi­tion, in some cas­es, the doc­u­ments made up in it can be made inter­ac­tive. And the files stored in it are struc­tural­ly sim­i­lar to HTML5 + CCS3.

In this wayDOCX is the most mod­ern for­mat that helps to cre­ate inter­ac­tive, graph­i­cal­ly lay­ered doc­u­ments that sup­port cur­rent lay­out tech­nolo­gies.

But the dif­fer­ence lies not only in the func­tion­al sup­port of cer­tain fea­tures.

What is the difference between Doc and Docx

The DOC for­mat appeared in the ear­ly 1990s, simul­ta­ne­ous­ly with the release of the Microsoft Word word proces­sor. It was orig­i­nal­ly pro­pri­etary and used exclu­sive­ly by this tech giant. Microsoft used it until 2007, when it released Word 2007.

Word 2007 switched to a new for­mat — DOCX, which became con­tain­er. In fact, files with this exten­sion are ZIP archives that store infor­ma­tion about markup, text, embed­ded images, tables, and scripts (sim­i­lar to a macro, only with less capa­bil­i­ties).

At the same time, Microsoft removed the “stig­ma” of pro­pri­etary from DOC. It was made open for non-com­mer­cial use, mean­ing devel­op­ers of third-par­ty open-source edi­tors like OpenOf­fice could add native sup­port to their appli­ca­tions.

DOCX is still in use today. It’s stan­dard on Microsoft­’s 2019 word proces­sors, includ­ing the cloud ver­sion of Office 365. In addi­tion, many third-par­ty edi­tors also open and save doc­u­ments in it.

The use of con­tainer­ized stor­age not only made doc­u­ments more beau­ti­ful and inter­ac­tive. It has sev­er­al oth­er advan­tages:

1. ZIP archiv­ing can sig­nif­i­cant­ly reduce the file size. For exam­ple, this arti­cle, saved in DOCX, takes up 16 kilo­bytes on the hard dri­ve. In the pre­vi­ous type — 40 kilo­bytes, and in RTF — 76 kilo­bytes.

2. Cre­at­ing a sep­a­rate detail sheet to man­age con­tent in a shared con­tain­er ensures that text and graph­ics are vis­i­ble across dif­fer­ent ver­sions of Microsoft office appli­ca­tions and third-par­ty edi­tors.

So in most cas­es it’s bet­ter to use DOCX. In addi­tion, DOC has many dis­ad­van­tages:

1. Dif­fer­ent dis­play of con­tent in dif­fer­ent edi­tors, includ­ing dif­fer­ent ver­sions of Microsoft office appli­ca­tions;

2. Poor com­pat­i­bil­i­ty with third-par­ty edi­tors.

1. DOCX gets rid of these short­com­ings

How­ev­er, Word 2003 and ear­li­er sim­ply does not open this for­mat, as it is not able to unpack the data con­tain­er.

Should You Use Alternatives?

Third-par­ty, open source office appli­ca­tions in most cas­es have sup­port for these two types of files, but at the same time save doc­u­ments in an incom­pre­hen­si­ble way. And this is a seri­ous minus.

So, OpenOf­fice and Libre­Of­fice use the ODT for­mat — Open­Doc­u­ment Text for sav­ing. In gen­er­al, it is sim­i­lar to DOC, that is, it is not con­tainer­ized and stores all data in one file. Because of this, seri­ous prob­lems can arise when open­ing ODT doc­u­ments in oth­er edi­tors — “wan­der­ing” for­mat­ting, incor­rect dis­play of images, in some cas­es even prob­lems with page ori­en­ta­tion.

Only “par­ent” appli­ca­tions can ade­quate­ly open ODT files (for exam­ple, if it was cre­at­ed in OpenOf­fice Writer, then it should open only in OpenOf­fice Writer) and the lat­est ver­sions of MS Word.

There­fore, even when using open source soft­ware, it is bet­ter to save your work in DOCX. This will ensure max­i­mum com­pat­i­bil­i­ty and usabil­i­ty, espe­cial­ly if you want to trans­fer the results of your work some­where else after edit­ing. But it is bet­ter not to use its pre­de­ces­sor, since the appear­ance of the pages will be such only on the com­put­er where they are cre­at­ed. When you try to open in anoth­er place, there is a chance that every­thing will “go”.

If you can­not save to DOCX, you can also use PDF for trans­fer. It pro­vides the same vis­i­bil­i­ty, but does not allow you to edit mate­ri­als (includ­ing copy­ing frag­ments) with­out the use of spe­cial appli­ca­tions.