Spaced Out ::

Now that Office 2007 is fully upon us, expect to be receiving the DOCX (and equivalent PPTX and XLSX) files from colleagues. These are the new OpenXML file format. And it really is just a plain text XML document in a ZIP wrapper. However I have an old Office 97 installation (meeting all my office needs) and have now converted over to Open Office 2 (which uses its own ODF, Open Document Format, and can read/write DOC files) which currently does not import DOCX (or derivatives). Plenty of people are working on converters or online services, but for the time being support is limited. That said, Novell Open Office does have an importer and this will apparently be fed in to the Open Office development at a later stage. For the time being the closest you can get to a DOCX/ODF converter is using the OpenXML/ODF Translator. It’s actually an MS Office plug-in to allow export, but there is a command line version which does the conversion as well. There are plenty of things it doesn’t support, but for simple documents it’s more than sufficient.