Word 2007 documents are still incompatible with Blackboard SafeAssign. While it is on the top of Blackboard’s enhancement list in terms of priority, they are not able to assign an ETA for such support. The automatic note visible to student on all SafeAssign submission links is still correct in its listing of appropriate file types. SafeAssign only works with Word 2003 and earlier(.doc) RichText (.rtf) and Plain Text (.txt) files. Students will need to save documents written with Word 2007 as the older “Word 97-2003 Document” (.doc) format in order for them to be processed by SafeAssign.
We would like to remind users that the Office 2007 suite of applications is still extremely new, and during any such process there will be a significant period of time during which other users have not made the transfer, including many of your professors. If you have any doubt that the person receiving your file can open your highest version, we recommend saving it in a backwards-compatible format. For users of the Office XP and 2003 versions, there is Compatibility Pack available on the Microsoft website that allows those applications to interpret 2007 files, but we are unable to vouch for the effectiveness of this third-party patch.