§ Formatds

*Update*

OpenOffice 2.3 already can open .docx files, just right-click and select to Open With OpenOffice.

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I’m starting to get .docx in my mail lately ( against my will…) and not using Microsoft Office and not beeing able to ask people to send at least .doc, I had to do some search to give some support do OpenOffice to this “format”.

Novell has created an OpenXML Translator for OpenOffice, and I found this guide at sigmundvoid. (I’ve just made some small changes)

This was tested in Ubuntu 7.04 “Feisty Fawn”

1- First you need to have ‘alien’ installed, an rpm to deb converter.

$ sudo apt-get install alien

2 – Grab yourself the Odf converter RPM, from here.

3 – Now lets convert it like this:

$ alien -ct odf-converter-1.0.0-5.i586.rpm

You will end up with a .tgz file.

Extract it to a directory:

$ tar -zxvf odf-converter-1.0.0.tgz

Now its time to copy a few files to allow us to open up our .docx file.

sudo cp usr/lib/ooo-2.0/program/OdfConverter /usr/lib/openoffice/program/

sudo cp usr/lib/ooo-2.0/share/registry/modules/org/openoffice/TypeDetection/Filter/MOOXFilter_cpp.xcu /usr/lib/openoffice/share/registry/modules/org/openoffice/TypeDetection/Filter/

sudo cp usr/lib/ooo-2.0/share/registry/modules/org/openoffice/TypeDetection/Types/MOOXTypeDetection.xcu /usr/lib/openoffice/share/registry/modules/org/openoffice/TypeDetection/Types/

OpenOffice is now compatible with the docx “format”.

In notice : PLEASE don’t send docx, at least .doc if you dont like standards…

Linux, Ubuntu