Web Design Discussion

As a professional web designer I often receive documents from clients that I can’t open. Recently I received a .docx file from a client who was using a new computer with MS Office 2007 installed. I have MS Word 2002 installed on my own computer so I was unable to open the Office 2007 document.

The .docx format is not compatible with older versions of Microsoft Word or with alternative operating systems like Linux or Mac OS X. It is also not compatible with other word processing applications like OpenOffice, Lotus 123, or NeoOffice.

How to convert .docx files to a readable format

Docx-converter.com converts a Microsoft Office .docx file into a simple html file. It strips out some of the formatting, but now supports bold, italic, and underlined text. Left, right, center, and justified alignment. Unicode characters, tables etc.

Other methods of converting .docx files

Rename the .docx file (after downloading) and change the extension from DOCX to ZIP. The icon associated with the file changes. Windows will now see it as a ZIP archive instead of a Word document. You can open the contents with WinZip, WinRAR, PKZIP, or any other ZIP compression tool.

The actual content of the document is contained in the document.xml file. You can change the contents of the file by editing the XML file directly with notepad, drop it back into the ZIP container, then change its extension from ZIP to DOCX. Now you have made the change to your docx file.

Resources

Exploring the XML File Formats

DOCX CONVERTER

This entry was posted on Monday, June 25th, 2007 at 10:58 am and is filed under Web Design . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.