May 29 2008
Why can’t I open DocX documents?
MS Office 2007 uses the extension of DocX as a default to save Word documents. Unfortunately, unless one has MS Office 2007, these documents can not be opened automatically — at least not yet. Here are a few of the things you need to know.
- You can ask the sender to send the document in a regular MS Word format, i.e., with a *.doc extension. The sender can click on “save as” in the top menu under “File” and select the document type of Word Document with the *.doc extension. The sender can also change the default document save to *.doc and then doesn’t have to worry whether the recipient has Office 2007.
- The only time the sender can not send a document in the regular *.doc format is if they are using the ‘trial’ version of MS Office 2007. Until the full version is purchased, apparently the *.doc extension is missing.
- There is a converter that can be purchased (several actually) but as of yet there is no Microsoft patch to add to previous versions of MS Office so the docX documents will convert automatically.
- One can upgrade to MS Office 2007 for $329 per copy.
- I opted for the $30 Panergy converter, which converts both Word and Excel documents.
- Interestingly enough, there IS a converter for the people who use OpenOffice instead of MS Office and OpenOffice is free. Novell distributed the OpenOffice converter. OpenOffice uses the ODF format that many governments use but MS is using XML instead. OpenOffice can read and save *.doc documents.
