Word 97 (.doc)
The Word 97-2003 binary format — the attachment format of thirty years of film-industry email, and the file half the world’s legacy scripts live in. We read it directly, no Word required.
Format facts
- Created
- 1997
- Created by
- Microsoft
- Status
- Current — in active use
- Reference
- Library of Congress format page ↗
Software that uses it
Native format of Microsoft Word (for screenwriting).
What it carries
- styled paragraphs carrying screenplay element structure
- bold, italic and underline runs
- three decades of legacy scripts written before .docx existed
What it can't represent
- classification of unstyled paragraphs falls back to layout heuristics (with a warning in the report)
- legacy binary internals mean exotic embedded objects are skipped
Where it came from
The .doc binary (an OLE Compound File) became Word’s default with Office 97 in 1997 and held the crown until .docx in 2007; Word can still save it, and every production office has a folder full of them.