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Help! A .docx File
I have a client who sent me a .docx file the other night for a project that had a next day delivery deadline. I’m not a Microsoft Office user, I stick with OpenOffice. The file I needed only had an image in it that I needed to complete the project. Don’t ask why he sent the image in a doc file. I needed the image, and he was gone for the night.
So I searched for a Office 2007 conversion utility and found that Microsoft had one. Sweet, they are good for something. Wait a minute! The download link on the Microsoft site pointed to a 404. Now how humorous is that? Very in my mind, but my giggling at the Microsoft 404 did nothing to help me get the image out of the file and thus complete my project — it was a Pyrrhic victory at best. Ding dang!
So, on I searched (over hill and dale) . Finally, I found an obscure blog posting about docx files, and found that they are nothing more than a clever compressed file. According to the article, if you changed the extension to .zip, you could open the resulting file in any of the popular compression tools (e.g., WinZip 
Since I did not need any text out of the document, just an embedded image, I gave it a try. I renamed the file to a .zip, opened up my licensed copy of WinZip (I support shareware), and voila! My image file was listed in the archive as clear as day beside all of the XML files that are used by Office 2007 to save your file. My guess is that I may have even been able to pull out text based content had there been any present.
Granted, this tip may not help you in all cases. I’d say that it is a good stopgap should you need a last minute solution though.
The easiest way to access an Office 2007 file (.docx, .pptx, etc.) is to just use zamzar.com’s file conversion utility. You can upload the file and have it converted to any other popular format and it’ll email you a link to download the converted file within a minute or two, depending on the complexity of the file. Zamzar works for docs and images too - real lifesaver! Enjoy!
March 26th, 2008 at 11:56 amActually OpenOffice files are zip files too; if you open one of them with a hex editor, you’ll see that first tow bytes are “PK” (sound familiar?).
I haven’t used it in a while, but I remember renaming some OO files to ZIP and opening with Winzip. If you do so, you’ll be able to see some XML files and the image file included (if any).
So I’m not saying MS took the idea from OO… Oh what the hell, YES they did it! ;D
Regards
March 27th, 2008 at 2:36 pmDM
“So I’m not saying MS took the idea from OO… Oh what the hell, YES they did it! ;D”. I’m not saying microsoft never steals anything from anyone else, but remember that if it were not for MS office there would not be an open source version of it.
March 27th, 2008 at 3:42 pmI don’t know about that. For the old ass people like me, there was Lotus. Of course that was before there were suites, but they had a pretty good word processor back then too… I believe it was Amiword (many brain cells have been burned since then). In my mind, Lotus of those days was far ahead of Excel of those days. And WordPerfect and even Wordstar were superior to Word. But it is all behind us now, and Office rules the business world, and OpenOffice has a nice foothold in the SOHO and technically savvy users (IMO).
March 27th, 2008 at 5:11 pmAre you freakin kidding me? All you have to do is rename the file to a “.doc” instead of .docx and it works. Goodness, youre quick to hate microsoft.
March 27th, 2008 at 6:29 pm@Adam… um… no, that does not work. So I can assume you were being sarcastic. I’ve been hating on Microsoft since Windows 3.1. BTW, I’ve heard that if you renamed it with a .wmv extension it converts it from text to video so that you can view it in Windows Media Player.
March 27th, 2008 at 6:46 pm@Joe
I was just kidding, although I do think that MS tends to get inspiration from external source pretty often.
Anyway, MS didn’t invented the Office suites. In fact, in the old days of MS-DOS & PC-DOS I used to work with WordPerfect 5.1, Lotus 1-2-3 and dBase III; all made by differente companies.
Man it was a nightmare to recalculate Lotus worksheets in my old XT with 640kb RAM :).
I must recognize that MS learned the lesson a while after and kicked WP, Lotus, dBase and QuattroPro out of the game, and came up with a really nice Office suite.
—
@admin
I see we both witnessed those glorious time when the only color on the screen was the green or amber from the 80×25 screen :D. (Well, maybe graphic mode using SIMCGA)
I’ve always knew that Wordstar was a pretty powerful application but I could never understood why they couldn’t come up with a decent interfase like WordPerfect 5.1.
CONTROL+K+S was a little more trickier thant F10->File->Save, wasn’t it?
—
@Adam
March 27th, 2008 at 7:14 pmI’ll have to assume that was sarcasm.
In case it wasn’t: putting your photo on a card and writing down “George W. Bush” with a pen on it doesn’t instantly transform you in the US President.
I don’t know why you people bother with Open Office. If you want a free version of office…just pirate it. lol. You can hate on M$ all you want, but the fact remains that a widely used format such as .doc or docx or .xls or .xlsx is an asset to the business world. We need huge, evil corporations like M$ in business so that things are actually compatible with each other — take that Linux.
March 27th, 2008 at 9:00 pmI believe the latest version of open office supports docx . correct me if I’m wrong.
March 27th, 2008 at 9:58 pmOf course it does.
March 28th, 2008 at 9:50 am@Nukka: Yes, we need worldwide standards, and OO is fully compatible with all those standards, whereas MS only seems to work well with HIS OWN format.
We need to be free to choose the file format we prefer, knowing that our recipient will be able to view, edit and (if he wants) convert it. This is the spirit of free business. There’s no point in imposing a standard, if your software is able to read all standards. You only do it if you want to compel everybody to buy an unnecessarily expensive application.
[...] Help! A .docx File [...]
March 28th, 2008 at 9:50 amDrake - try to understand the software before you make claims about MS stealing this “feature.” This works as a result of the docx format being based on XML.
Microsoft gets enough crap, but it’s just stupid to criticize them for adopting a better standard. It would be like criticizing them for making CD burning software that works with standard CD formats.
March 28th, 2008 at 10:52 am@David
Try to understand my post before you make claims about what I say.
As I said before, I was just joking (the “;D” may be a helpful hint to make that clear).
I’m not into beating up MS every moment of my life,
and I’m not a Linux/GNU/FSF fundamentalist either.
And I didn’t criticize MS for adopting a better standard, in fact that’s a wise thing to do. I would have been nice if they had done the same with HTML and Javascript for example.
Anyway, I don’t know how much crap is enough. Sometimes they don’t deserve it, but sometimes they really do.
Have a nice day.
March 28th, 2008 at 1:20 pmI found this out on Linux after I downloaded it and it opened with Archive manager. Interesting
March 30th, 2008 at 2:48 pmOpen office has fixed the problem and the latest version happily opens ALL new Office 2007 file formats.
April 9th, 2008 at 11:35 amhttp://www.novell.com/prblogs/?p=299
^ This is a patch by Novell for Open Office that’ll let you open Open XML documents (like .docx).
April 11th, 2008 at 12:19 pm(By the way, the patch above is for OpenOffice).
April 11th, 2008 at 12:20 pmIf it’s an urgent issue and you don’t have a solution, send me the file and I will convert it to a standard *.doc . I have Office 2007 on one PC, and I do this for all files that are *.docx After that I can use them on my laptop.
July 7th, 2008 at 3:57 am