Matt Ingenthron's Stream of Consciousness

Thursday January 10, 2008

Opening .docx files with OpenOffice on Solaris

For the first time I've encountered one of the Microsoft Office 2007 (sometimes called Office Open XML, though open-ness is in dispute in various places) files. I suspect I and many others will probably soon encounter these for the first time since a bevy of new Vista PCs with MS Office demo software installed were sold over Christmas.

The answer was not easily found. The semi-official answer is on the OpenOffice wiki. Since I use StarOffice on Solaris and don't encounter these things often, I decided to use the online document conversion. Zamzar, the top result from the google search attached to the link in the wiki there did a fine job. I'm certain I could get the Novell converter to run on Solaris BrandZ but it would be a major hassle and looking at the web pages, it may not even be necessarily portable between different Linux releases.

Ideally there'd be a simple converter that I wouldn't need to deal with advertisements for. Perhaps one of those other OO.o projects with some of the not-yet-ready-for-primetime converters could set up a small site?

Oh yeah, where did the file come from? It was my girlfriend's cousin's daughter's from school. Disappointing since OpenOffice is free and properly Open...