The Irvken Experience

odf & docx in OpenOffice « Blah blah blah
odf & docx in OpenOffice

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?

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).

Unfortunately the server is down