Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated July 14, 2022)
This tip applies to Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021
Normally, Word saves your documents in what is known as "Word format." That means that the documents are stored in a format based on XML. This format may not be easily understood by other versions of Word, nor by other programs.
If you do a lot of work creating documents for other versions of Word or other programs, you may want to specify a different default file format for your documents. Word makes this easy by following these steps:
Figure 1. The Save option of the Word Options dialog box.
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