Open docx files in OpenOffice.org
April 2, 2008 by Clair Ching
Filed under Geeky Fun, applications
Have you been finding it a hassle to open docx files from your co-workers and/or clients? Ubuntu Geek helps us with this: Use the ODF Converter!
There’s a .deb package which you could download and install on your Debian-powered machines. Also, there’s an RPM file for SUSE.
Though the Novell RPM file is said to only work with the latest Novell version of OpenOffice.org, you might as well give it a try. The blog post on Ubuntu Tip also gave a way for Slackware users to convert from rpm to a Slackware tgz file:
Use alien to convert it to a Slackware tgz file:
fakeroot alien -ct odf-converter-1.0.0-5.i586.rpm
Unpack the slackware tgz file:
tar xzf odf-converter-1.0.0.tgz
Copy three files into your OpenOffice.org directories — note that the usr that you’re copying from is a directory that was inside the tgz file.
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/
Restart OpenOffice.org and start opening those shared docx files 
Thanks to Productive Linux for the link to Ubuntu Geek!
I think OOo 2.4 that comes with Hardy by default can open .DOCX files out of the box
It comes by default but the conversion is very poor compared to the novell edition. I opened the same docx that works perfectly in the novell converter (that was actually created in openoffice and exported to docx) and it looks terrible.