Did you just receive a DOCX file?
With the release of Office 2007, Microsoft introduced a new format for all it’s Office products. One such format is DOCX. And since not everyone has adopted the 2007 version, there is a mix of formats going on around the Internet and sooner or later you are bound to receive a DOCX file in your inbox. So what can you do with this file if you don’t have the program (Word 2007) to open it? As it turns out, there are loads of options that you have. In this post, I am going to list out some of these options.
Of course, the best option, if you just want to view the file, is to use the Word 2007 viewer from Microsoft. This allows you to open the DOCX file and view it. It is a free utility from Microsoft. Another option from Microsoft is available to you if you have an earlier version of Office installed (such as Office 2003). It is called the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack. This allows you to open, view, and edit Office 2007 documents in Office 2003 or Office XP. If you don’t like Microsoft, but still want to view the file that you have, there are other options, and I point out out 3 of these below:
Zamzar – Zamzar is a free online file conversion service. It allows you to covert a file from a number of formats to a number of formats. One of these formats from which you can convert is DOCX. You can convert the file to a number of formats (such as DOC, PDF, TXT, PNG, etc.).
DOCX Converter – This one is a service which is dedicated to DOCX files. It is a bare minimum conversion utility, which simply converts a DOCX file to an HTML file (an option that is not available in Zamzar). This also allows you to install a dashboard widget.
DOCX2DOC – This one is another specialized service which converts a DOCX file to a DOC file. Now why would you want to do this if you have the option of a compatibility pack? Well, you may not want to install this pack or may not have permissions to install this pack.
All of these services would have some delay associated with the conversion in the free version of their service, but then you never know when you would need something like this.