A couple of days ago I wrote about the fact that many people still use Office 2003 and are unable to read documents created in Office 2007. The solution that I suggested was that if you are using Office 2003, you should download the compatability pack that allows you to read Office 2007 documents.

Of course, not everyone will download the compatability pack. Tom Mighell, of Inter Alia, has a different solution. He suggests using Scribed.

Tom explains:

Here’s how it works. Take your document and attach it to an email. Address it to the members of your team, and CC ipaper@scribd.com on the message. Scribd will take your document, convert it to iPaper, and send your collaborators a copy of the link to the online document. And if you haven’t viewed a document in Scribd yet, you’re missing out. Scribd supports a lot of document formats, too — in addition to all Office files (both 2003 and 2007), it will convert PDF, PS, .TXT, .RTF, and open document formats.

The great thing about Tom’s solution is that you are simply adding an additional email address to your message. You do not have to take the time to manually upload the file a to a service such as Scribed or Google Docs.

As always, when using a service such as this, you must be cognizant of their terms of use to make sure that you are not disclosing confidential information to third parties. However, this is a great simple solution for sharing documents with others without worrying about what software program your recipient is using.