16 September 2008

How to open MS Office 2007 files on Windows without MS Office

I am currently using OpenOffice v. 2.4 at work, which doesn't support MS Office 2007 files. Sometimes I just need to read these files, and not really edit them. E.g., I will get a .docx or a .xlsx file from a colleague or vendor. Just yesterday I couldn't open a .docx file from our outsourced vendor. MS Office 2007 support won't arrive until OpenOffice.org 3.0 comes out (it's in beta testing right now). So my quick solution was to download the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 file formats and the Word Viewer. Together those allowed me to open the vendor's .docx document. Note that the Word Viewer 2003 plus SP3 update seems to work well too.

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