That's ok, I still prefer Word 2003 to the bloated, web-wired, ribbon-infested garbage that came after.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47202540

Yeah, I think I mentioned it here a few months ago, but I got Office 97 working with Wine, and I was sort of flabbergasted at how usable it still is. It worked fine with my system's TrueType fonts, it does all the formatting I care about, and given that it's nearly 30 year old software it runs obscenely fast. If I weren't a grumpy die-hard CLI person I would probably still consider using it.

All that said, there are a lot of people who want the absolute latest MS Office. I don't get it either.

I'm glad this is still a complaint. I used Office 2004 (same as 03) until 2013, when I absolutely couldn't anymore because of docx incompatibility. My wife still uses 07, sadly it's ribboned.

Do you have the docx compatibility pack installed?

doc vs docx is whatever, what kills older offices for me is the 64k row/col limit in excel. That was only fixed with the ribboned versions. :(