odf & docx in OpenOffice
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Unless you have been cast away in some remote island or hiding under some rock or in some cave (btw, of all three choices, the first one does not seem that bad 
in my opinion), the battle between open document format promoted by several open source supporters and the ooxml format promoted by MS has been raging. Most recently, ooxml was not accepted as a national standard and then as an international standard.
In plain words, what it means, is that if you use Word 2007 and save it as docx (not doc format) you may end up with lots of documents nobody can access (unless they part with a sizable amount of money to buy Office 2007). Anyone knows that OpenOffice saves and opens office documents (doc, xls, ppt). What about docx documents?
UPDATE #2: Also check out this updated post from this blog.
UPDATE: The following link is dead and gets you the error page at Novel. Instead, follow this new link and the instructions provided in the destination page. Enjoy!!!
OLD stuff
The answer is a converter available at this address compliments of the good guys at Novell. If you follow the link you can download either a solution for windows platforms or an rpm archive for linux platforms. From there (the rpm platform) some work is necessary if your setup does not use rpms. In most cases, the command “alien” will take the rpm and translate it into a deb archive or a tar.gz archive (your choice).
I prefer the tar.gz approach and then completed the following:
1) translate rpm to tar.gz
2) unpack tar.gz archive
3) copy the /usr/lib/ooo-2.0 directory (and its subdirectories) to where openoffice is located in my box.
4) restart openoffice
5) Find under the Open or Save menu choices for docx files
NB. It works for both x86 and 64bit boxes.
Enjoy!
I.
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I do appreciate the help. I used alien to translate to a tar.gz file. I untarred it, and produced a directory named ooo-2.0. Inside ooo-2.0 were two other directories: program and share. Inside program was OdfConverter, an executable. share contained registry which contained modules which contained org which contained openoffice which contained TypeDetection which contained Filter and Types…I gave up. No lib, as you had.
Instead, I took a jab in the dark and executed OdtConverter against a .docx file. It correctly converted it. That’s good enough for me.
Thanks.
[...] and newer ones, too. Yes, I am referring to the newer marketing stint from microsoft with the docx and xlsx files which do not open with older versions of office, say office [...]
@Andrew Z:
Thanks for the advice and the new link. As you can see, I have already updated the links and material.
I.
[...] in openoffice revisited From the pages of this blog, I wrote in the past about the ability of openoffice to open and save in the notorious docx (and [...]
Hi there,
Any idea if this works on all versions of Linux / Open Office? Or is this just a Red Hat thing?
Thanks!
[...] Microsoft’s new ooxml format that apparently even MS will no longer support I have written extensively in the past about the docx saga and I have noted that the best choice maybe the odf converter (at [...]
[...] the pages of this blog, I wrote in the past about the ability of openoffice to open and save in the notorious docx (and [...]