Quick fix: How to open a docx file without Office 2007
If you Google that question you find a number of sites explaining that docx files (Office 2007 files) cannot be opened by Office Word 2003 or earlier and that you will need to download and install all 27 megs of a compatibility pack made available by Microsoft. There are also several online document converters that supposedly convert docx files to PDF or doc files but in my experience they either don’t deliver or they charge.
The simplest way to open a docx file is to email it to your Gmail.com account, and then to view the file as html, which lets Gmail do all the converting, and save you a lot of hassle!
How is emailing something to yourself then opening it in gmail easier than taking the 60 seconds to download the compatibility pack?
Better still how is creating a Gmail account then emailing something to yourself then opening it in gmail easier than taking the 60 seconds to download the compatibility pack?
DocX? Who even uses that! By the time it becomes a widely used format, every other freemium software vendor will end up being very compatible. Buying Microsoft Office is like paying to go to a tanning booth in Hawaii… The sun (microsystems) is shining, for free.
http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?t=54299
Hi Mark, Erik – I suspect you live in broadband heaven – but for most South African users downloading 27 megs takes more than 30 secs. 30 minutes is more likely. And then nearly half of them still sit on dialup so it is out of the question for them. Oh and the price per meg if you have run over your meagre 1 GIG contract with MTN is R2 per meg. Yup think I’ll take Gmail…
Hi Guy – yeah it should be banned. But some of the larger corporates still insist and then the execs on the other side don’t know much more about Word than opening and saving (in docx) a file. Sad but true… Nobody with any sense would touch Office 2007 or Vista for that matter!