Niki Kovacs wrote:

Roger asked:

...

Is there any way I can read a .docx file on my CentOS desktop ?

Open Office 3 will do it.

Yep, as well as .xlsx

But, I mean, you know all the *pressing* and Important reasons that M$ had to change the file format....

mark "sell more copies of the new version? Nahhhh...."

m.roth@5-cent.us wrote:

...

Yep, as well as .xlsx

But, I mean, you know all the *pressing* and Important reasons that M$ had to change the file format....

FWIW, the new formats are XML based, albeit compressed. in most theories, this is a good idea for portability.

the old file formats were proprietary, complex and full of ugliness from 20 years of extensions and variations (.DOC was used by MS Word for MSDOS circa 1985). Yes, I know, MS did their own XML 'open' document

<snip> Yeah, some of us have been around that long and remember. Fortunately, I wasn't forced to pollute my mind with Word until the late nineties, at worst. Until then, when M$ paid with what we now know were illegal kickbacks to the manufacturers, *everyone* used WordPerfect, which, starting with 5.0, was *very* good.

Too bad they have never been able to market their way out of a wet paper bag with the Governator. Also dumb, since their reveal codes showed codes that would have had a one-to-one translation to html.

mark

John R Pierce wrote:

m.roth@5-cent.us wrote:

...

Yep, as well as .xlsx

But, I mean, you know all the *pressing* and Important reasons that M$ had to change the file format....

FWIW, the new formats are XML based, albeit compressed. in most theories, this is a good idea for portability.

the old file formats were proprietary, complex and full of ugliness from 20 years of extensions and variations (.DOC was used by MS Word for MSDOS circa 1985). Yes, I know, MS did their own XML 'open' document format, not the one everyone else is using, but at least being XML, its readily decodable.

Sorry but M$ supposedly "open" format isn't. If M$ would have wanted to be really Open, it would have chosen ODF or develop OOXML in an open manner... I have many clients that lived the Office nightmare where the Office versions are not able to perfectly render files between them, where the "compatibility plugins" don't translate 100%, etc. All that to force clients to buy new version of Office, the "Admiral Ship" of M$.

This is the "spread like a virus and bug the others" method... New PCs of my clients were sold with Office 2007 while the older PCs had 2003. Technical documents were loosing formatting, no matter what we tried. We called M$ and we were told to call Dell because Office was OEM. We call Dell and they said to call M$... Finally, Dell was forced to do something but they said they would do something they're not supposed: Sell us Office 2007 OEM for the older PCs... But still, it doesn't cure the problem with our 2500 technical spec sheets that were done with Office 2007...

I pushed a lot for my clients to adopt Open Office but they told me it isn't "standard" and that they would't be able to work with other companies that, in majority, were using "standard" M$ Office!!! So here we have FUD, misundertanding of the word "standard" and users that freak out because they don't know Open Office... M$ and users at their best...

See: http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/odf_ooxml_technical_white_paper (there is a link for the PDF version on top of this article: http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/node/2138/pdf)

GB

-----Original Message----- From: centos-bounces@centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces@centos.org] On

Behalf

Of m.roth@5-cent.us Sent: Wednesday, November 25, 2009 7:22 PM To: CentOS mailing list Subject: Re: [CentOS] Docx format ?

Niki Kovacs wrote:

...

Roger asked:

...

Is there any way I can read a .docx file on my CentOS desktop ?

Open Office 3 will do it.

Yep, as well as .xlsx

What about Powerpoint presentations, ie .pptx-files? Do they look anywhere near the original look when opened in MS Office?

I'm looking into setting up a public computer in our seminar room, running CentOS on an old door-stopper I had handy; a P3/500 with barely 500MB RAM.

On Thu, 2009-11-26 at 08:58 +0100, Niki Kovacs wrote:

Indeed. I just gave it a try, it works. But I have to open the file from within OO, there's no preconfigured file association.

I don't have a docx file here to try (though I suppose I could find and download one) but what if you right-click on the docx file, select properties and set "open with" to oo3?

Robert Heller wrote:

At Wed, 25 Nov 2009 19:13:06 +0100 CentOS mailing list centos@centos.org wrote:

...

Hi,

Is there any way I can read a .docx file on my CentOS desktop ?

A .docx is a ZIP file with some XML files in the archive. One of those XML files contains the *text* of the document. One can use an XML processing program to strip off the XML, leaving the bare textual content. It will be unformatted, though.

You need openoffice "novell" version from: http://go-oo.org/

-- Eero