Ubuntu Linux Help

Occasionally I receive a file in .docx format, which for me was useless; and I’ve had to ask the sender to give me the document in .doc format instead. However, there’s a better solution for those of us who encounter the .docx format. It does take a couple of minutes to set up, but is easy to use thereafter.

There are two ways to do this. The “Long” way and the “Short” way.

The Long Way:

We’ll need three tools:

1. OpenOffice. The premier open source office suite.
2. An odf converter. That’s what facilitates the .docx capability.
3. Alien. This is an application that converts archive formats. It allows us to convert packages from other distributions to our format; (I’m using Ubuntu Linux) and then install it.

First, we can get the odf converter here:

OpenOffice.OpenXML Translator 1.1.0

In my case I would use odf-converter-1.1-7.i586.rpm (and will use alien to convert it for my Ubuntu Linux platform). To download the converter, I had to create a username and password.

I’m pretty sure that the majority of us may already have open office installed, so we just need to install alien like this:

sudo apt-get install alien

Now we just need to use alien to convert the file:

alien -ct odf-converter-1.1-7.i586.rpm

Extract the .tgz file you are left with and (within the extracted directory):

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

However, you’ll want to use the short, easy method below!

The Short (Recommend) Way:

There is a plugin available for openoffice that will convert the format so that we can open .docx files.

OpenOffice.org OpenXML Translator

From the download page:

“The OpenXML Translator provides support for opening and saving Microsoft* OpenXML-formatted word processing documents (.docx) in OpenOffice.org.”

After the download, just double click the .deb file and start openoffice. You should be good to go!

You did choose the “Short Way” didn’t you?
I really hope this helps someone.