Microsoft's "upgrades" to 2003 are bloatware that took a relatively decent product (even though MS Word remains miles behind Word Perfect in terms of intuitiveness and ease of use. But that's another discussion) and too often made it unnecessarily frustrating.

We still happily run 2003 after having downloaded and run the Office Compatibility pack from MS. We can now open the later docx et al files and also write to that format.