Office 97 DOCX Converter

Friday, 21 May, 2010

People keep sending me damn Office 2007 files; I hate them! I have no desire or want to install the behemoth that is Office 2007 and whilst I applaud the move to an XML format (even if the certification process might not have been as above board as it could have been) we all had a perfectly good, and well understood, binary format in DOC (and XLS/PPT) files that could be opened by everyone and their uncle. Now we have this whole pain of incompatability to go through yet again. As a result Office 97 converters are advertised across the internet; some of the online services are naff, whilst the shareware ranges for malware, to bad to OK. And yes, I still use Office 97; its fast and mostly does what I want it to do, but alas Microsoft decided in their infinite wisdom that the Office Compatibility Pack would only support Office 2000 onwards. So alas I am stuck with the crap converter in Open Office (although at least I can open the files).

Or so I though. After a bit of Googline I came across this batch converter so tried it… it didn’t convert any of the files I had, but during the install it did a download which I suspected was probably one of the Microsoft converters. I uninstalled the crapware, but it left these behind and, low and behold, if I open a DOCX in Office 97 it converts it to a DOC file and, well, just loads it! Same for XLSX and PPTX. I don’t know whether the crapware spoofed it in to believing that at least Office 2000 was installed, but I’m not complaining. Of course, why Microsoft couldn’t do this I don’t know….

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