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Open Office 2007 files in Linux
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Occasionally (or often), when one sends you Office 2007 files (docx, xlsx, pptx) and you are using OpenOffice, you wonder how to open it? I can suggest, my tried and tested solution on OpenOffice, on Linux.
Earlier I had been converting Office 2007 on Linux command line using OdfConverter as per the instructions at http://www.oooninja.com/2008/01/convert-openxml-docx-etc-in-linux-using.html.
Today saw Ubuntu Linux opening Office 2007 files in OpenOffice 2.4. I have been using Fedora (as of this writing I’m running Fedora 9) on my laptop.Definitely there had to be something similar, for OpenOffice 2.4 in Fedora 9.
Found it at the following URL: http://katana.oooninja.com/w/odf-converter-integrator
- Fedora users can install the RPMs from http://katana.oooninja.com/f/software/odf-converter-integrator-0.1.5-1.i386.rpm
- Once this RPM is installed, double clicking any Office 2007 file will open the corresponding file in OpenOffice.
How it works
- It basically registers a script – a python script – called odf-converter-integrator (found in /usr/bin directory) which is associated with the MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) types of Office 2007 files.
- This script uses the same OdfConverter binary which I used before and converts the Office 2007 file on the fly.
Shortcomings
- While this will open an Office 2007 file using double click, you cannot open an Office 2007 file using File->Open in OpenOffice.
- Don’t expect to be able to save the file in Office 2007 format. You will have to choose one of the OpenOffice supported file formats (like ODT, DOC, ODS, XLS, ODP, PPT etc.).
Update (Oct 20, 2008): The convertor documents do not show SmartArt (if used) in the Office 2007 files, not even as an embedded image.
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Tags: doc, docx, Fedora, Internet Mail Extensions, Linux, odfconvertor, odt, office, office 2007, Open Office, openoffice, ppt, pptx, tried and tested solution, windows, xls, xlsx Discussion
2 comments for “Open Office 2007 files in Linux”
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I had installed an earlier version 0.1.3 and found a peculiar thing happening, if I try and open the file from within OpenOffice it does not seem to recognise the file type and pops up a file type selection list, same thing happened in 0.1.5 but if I open a file browser and double-click the file it opens it fine!
Have you had a similar experience?
Cheers…Kishore
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Same experience.
OpenOffice opens the Filter Selection dialog if you use the File>Open, browse and select a docx (or Office 2007) file and try to open it.
The reason for this is odf-convertor-integrator is an external script (and not an OpenOffice filter). This script is associated with all the Office 2007 extensions (to be precise MIME types) during the RPM installation. It is like – for 2007 files, “Open With” > odf-convertor-integrator.
This script in turn converts the 2007 files into OpenDocument files and invokes OpenOffice to open the converted file. OpenOffice does not even know the existence of this script and the script does not plug-into OpenOffice.
It is interesting to see the mapping of Office 2007 file extensions to OpenDocument file extensions at line 177 in the odf-convertor-integrator script.
On the other hand, Ubuntu seems to have some OpenOffice filters for reading 2007 file. But the link to odf-convertor-integrator mentions these filters to be of Alpha quality and recommends itself to be better
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