Opening docx files

[no2thesame]

Have any of you started getting MSOffice 2007 files as attachments yet?

The default file format from MS Office 2007's Word has a .docx extension as a replacement for the familiar .doc. Tonight, late, I was sent such a beast and OpenOffice.org 2.2 on my VL SOHO 5.8 box did not know what to do with it. Needing to have it edited by morning, a quick Google and not much fiddling resulted in a conversion to a .odf file!

Apparently OpenOffice.org 3.x will open these files. Until then, a command line method from OOoNinja worked for me with some modifications.

1. I downloaded OdfConverter 1.1.7 from http://download.go-oo.org/red-carpet/ooo-680/sled-10-sp-i586/odf-converter-1.1-7.i586.rpm.

2. Opened a terminal and opened Midnight commander

Code:

cd Downloads
mc

3. Selected odf-converter-1.1-7.i586.rpm in Midnight Commander, pressed F2 and chose Explode ...rpm... to subdir then F10 to get out of Midnight Commander.

4. Changed to root and copied the programme to /usr/bin, then exited root shell

Code:

su
cp cp odf-converter-1.1-7.i586/usr/lib/ooo-2.0/program/OdfConverter /usr/bin
exit

5. To convert myfirst.docx to myfirst.odt , I moved to the directory where I had saved the docx and typed:

Code:

OdfConverter /i myfirst.docx

and myfirst .odt appeared in the directory after lots of 'progress' in the terminal.

6. OpenOffice.org opened and edited myfirst.odt without problems.

For help on OdfConverter usage: use the command without arguments

Code:

OdfConverter

For integration into OpenOffice.org, but I haven't tried this.

no2

[The Headacher]

I moved your post to the Howto's, as that seems more appropriate, and it's less likely to get lost there.

I'm sure it will prove very useful for a lot of people here on the forum, thanks for posting!

[InTheWoods]

Have any of you started getting MSOffice 2007 files as attachments yet?

I have run into these and they are troublesome. The Mac users in the house have to work collaboratively with other students and now Mac office is a must.

Previously I had them using Abiword and Open Office. Aparently you can't even cut and paste between Office 2007 and other apps! And (although I don't know if this is new) they can't print their documents on the local university's printers.Office 2007 isn' t backwards compatible with older versions of Office either.

MS is evil and it got another pound of my flesh. Glad to see people finding ways to resist.

[BlueMage]

Aparently you can't even cut and paste between Office 2007 and other apps! And (although I don't know if this is new) they can't print their documents on the local university's printers.Office 2007 isn' t backwards compatible with older versions of Office either.

Not true - Office 2007 works like any other office suite with regards to copy-paste.  Office 2007 is backwards compatible with previous Office version files, however, it runs them in a compatibility mode rather than a native mode - it's still possible to edit them and save the changes such that the previous versions of Office can read and edit them.