Open Office and .docx

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Quite some time ago I dropped MS Office in favor of Open Office and have not been sorry I made that change. I had been using an older version of Office and MY needs are rather minimal, so Open Office has served me well these past few months.

My daughter-in-law is a nursing student at our local (state) university and presented me with a file she needs to open (attached) and I’ve been searching The Lounge and Googling for converters that might do the job. So far I’ve run into a dead end and don’t have any idea what’s inside this file. The filename would lead one to believe that it contains blank forms of some kind. She and my son have Office 2000 installed but I don’t know if I have the courage to suggest that it’s time for them to upgrade. I haven’t checked the Open Office pages yet to see if they have a temporary solution for this problem.

One place I tried ( .docx DOCX Convert Office 2007 ) claims to convert a submitted file and send the result by email but the result is a “404 error.

Any ideas? Thanks.

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I have installed the Office 2007 Converter Pack on my PC and converted the document to Word 97-2003 format; Open Office should be able to open that. I don’t know how accurate the conversion is since I don’t have Office 2007.

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Thank you, Hans! I don’t know if any formatting is lost in the conversion, but your conversion looks doggone good to me. My email will be on the way to her as soon as I finish this post. Thanks again!

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Hans –
On my work machine I have both Office 2003 and Office 2007, your converted document appears to be the same in Office 2007 as it does in Office 2003.

The difference between Genius and Stupidity:
A Genius knows their limits.
- Albert Einstein

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Hi Ed,

Thanks for the confirmation!

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Hi Al,

The version of OpenOffice 2.3.0 available at http://go-oo.org[/url%5D opens your document on my machine. Of course I also have the latest word viewer from Microsoft installed so that might help, but I tnink OOo is opening the doc by itself

HTH

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Must be this Word Viewer then John for I too have 2.3.0 installed and the file wouldn’t open for me.

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I have version 2.3.0 too, and a .docx file I tried the other day didn’t open for me even though I do also have Office 2003 and the Office 2007 converter. Maybe the version jonWallace mentioned from http://go-oo.org[/url%5D is different. Their site seems to claim that their build does things that the regular build doesn’t do. (My Open Office came from http://www.openoffice.org[/url%5D .)

Ian

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The version at go-oo.org is built from the Novell version and includes a couple of features that haven’t (or hadn’t) quite made it to the official builds (and a different splash screen…). There isn’t a 2.3.1 build yet..

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I’ve now installed the version from go-oo.org instead, and it does indeed open a .docx file that the version from openoffice.org wouldn’t open.

Ian

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Ahh… and with Novell and Microsoft making that partnership a while back, this is probably why the version of OpenOffice.org from http://go-oo.org works, and not the one from the parent project site.

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Al

Experiment shows that the build from go-oo.org will open a .docx file but the build from openoffice.org won’t.

Ian

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[indent]

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…the latest word viewer from Microsoft…

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[/indent]I’m not sure I downloaded the correct one. This morning I thought I did but it doesn’t recognize the file with the .docx extension. I think I’ll go back and take another look. I may have gotten the wrong version.

I’m also still reluctant to switch to that “other” version of Open Office, especially for something like this as a motivator. Maybe it’ll be better to just wait until Open Office catches up.

Edited to add: I DID download the wrong version. It turns out they are up to SP3 and I just downloaded the ran that.

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There is no “native” Word 2007 Viewer as yet.
You need to install both the Word 2003 Viewer *and* the Office 2007 Compatibility Pack in order to be able to view Word 2007 documents.
The latest versions be downloaded from Word Viewer and Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats.

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Thanks again, Hans. As soon as I installed the SP3 above, I got a message about downloading the compatibility thingie. I’ve gotta run now, so I’ll do it this afternoon. Thanks to you and all – lots of lessons here.

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Well, another one of the vagaries of installing software that doesn’t ASK permission to do stuff!

Back when I first replaced my Office with Open Office, it asked my permission to associate files like .doc, .ppt and .xls with Open Office instead of MS Office. Of course I gave the permission. Since that time, if I execute one of the former Office filetypes, it opens Open Office which is fine with me. Upon subsequent saves, Open Office offers to save the modified file in its unique file type, such as .odt instead of .doc and that too has been fine with me.

However, after installing the compatibility pack thing, all the filetypes that used to be associated with Office have been messed with and un-associated with Open Office and I was NOT asked for permission to do so. Now, if I double-click a .doc file, the MS Word Viewer opens rather than Open Office! When checking other filetypes such as .xls or .ppt I now get a message offering to SAVE AS a filetype such as .xlsm rather than opening the file with either Excel or Open Office. Aaarrrggghhh! And this was only to help my girl out with something in nursing school!

Well, it’s certainly not the end of the world and I guess I can re-install Open Office and have it take back whatever file associations, but it’s the very fact that MS didn’t ask or tell me what it was about to do…

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Hi Al,

If you’re going to reinstall (rather than repair) OpenOffice, can I suggest the go-oo version which does have the docx capability inbuilt. It also loads a little bit faster and has the handy-dandy zoom dropdown on the toolbar instead of having to look for it. It also claims (IIRC) a better PDF export.

Obviously YMMV

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And just to beat this dead horse to even deader…

I’ve just popped back from the ooo forum at http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/forum%5B/url%5D where the go-oo.org version of openoffice was suggested as a solution for those who want to open wordperfect documents. So there you go.

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Came across this site…
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ooop/%5B/url%5D It is talking about oxygenOffice.

Now is this different from the go-oo site??? It seems to be Open Office with some add ins?????

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Yes,
oxygenoffice is different from go-oo. As far as I remember Oxygenoffice is built from the same code base as the standard OOo, but as you say has add-ins. go-oo is based on the novell build, has a few minor UI differences, loads faster and has some extended compatibility with MS Office (some office 2007 support, some support for spreadsheet VBA).It aslo has some esoteric enhancements that haven’t yet made it into the OOo mainstream.

There are a couple of other offshoots. Eurooffice and IBM Lotus Symphony are probably the best known for western cultures, and I believe there is a Chinese version.

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Al,

I was reading about this yesterday. I am not sure exactly which forum I was on but this link will take you to the general forum area.

We, too, are looking to upgrade from Office 2000 and I am researching Open Office and Star Office as alternatives. The ability to read and exchange Office 2007 files is imperative. The forum that I read talked about an upgrade for Open Office that allowed this, but that there were issues with that upgrade working.

Sorry I cannot be more specific about WHICH forum said this. I was in so many places yesterday my head was spinning.

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Thanks for joining in! I’ve been trying to keep up with Open Office ever since I switched but it sounds like YOUR needs are are much more critical then mine. I’ll just keep up with their web pages and see what comes up.

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I’d check out Office 2007. Yes, I know it isn’t cheap. I’ve been using it since shortly after it came out and have been very pleased. The ribbon interface is easy to get used to. When you are checking alternatives be sure to check with your users about what features/functions they use in Office and make sure those are available in the alternatives. Also check out any macros or other Office code that might be around.

Joe

--Joe

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I have to agree. I first tasted Office 2007 at work, and liked it so well that I procured a copy for my home machine. I found the initial switch to the ribbon jarring, but I have since come tro really appreciate it for all the functionality it exposes. I just wish Outlook and OneNote shared that interface. Oh well, maybe in the next version.

Most of the changes are subtle, and useful – particularly in Outlook.

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