Mac users have been hard at work investigating how to crack Microsoft's cryptic Office 2007 code. The finding: the Catholic church is not to blame, and there are four ways to open the docs which we've listed here from easiest to greatest pain in the butt.
 Four letters: docx... the message remains hidden for Mac users. |
Since the news broke that
Microsoft's Mac Business Unit is not supplying converters for Microsoft Office's new "Open Format" documents, the Mac community has been busy finding its own ways around the problem.
There are now at least four ways to get around Office for Mac's inability to deal with these new files. I've road-tested them all and now list them in order, from easiest to greatest pain in the butt.
For the test, I started with a simple Word 2007 document, containing some text with some bold and italics and a picture:
1. Docx-converter
The docx-converter web site lets you upload a docx file for conversion into text. It promises to support bold, italics, underlining and Unicode.
In my test, it didn't recognise the bold or italic text (unexpected) and it didn't recover the graphic (expected):
The people at docx converter have also released a widget. It converts the docx file and saves the converted text as an html file in the same directory as the original. An option on the back of the widget tells it to display the converted file in a browser.
It couldn't deal with my document at all---no html file, no browser display. Nothing.
2. docx Automator Script
A Mac user called Jose has created an Automator action that converts the file into plain text. It's more fiddly than the docx-converter web site because it requires that the docx file be renamed with the zip extension, unzipped and the resulting folder dropped on the action's icon. But it works:
3. Manual conversion with a text editor
This is even more of a pain than the Automator script. As well as renaming and unzipping, you need to navigate through the resulting folder until you find the document.xml file in the word sub-folder. Then you need to load it up into a text editor like BBEdit, which can strip the XML tags out, leaving you with the text:
4. Ask the sender nicely to send it again
This quick road-test suggests that the only way to open anything like a real world Word document with images and formatted text, and to see it as the sender intended, is to ask the sender to resave the document in the old *.doc format and send it again. Then Word for Mac very happily opens it (although in my test, the formatting was gone):
I've listed this last because although it is not technically difficult to ask someone to send you a document again, it does suggest that something is wrong with your Mac. That sticks in my throat. And it feeds the fantasies of my PC-wielding friends. And it is all the more annoying because until the converters come out, for all intents and purposes there is something wrong with my Mac.
Lastly, it sticks in my throat because it is what Microsoft recommends. The Mac Business Unit contains a lot of talented people. They have had the code of the new Office for a long time. The only possible reason for the delay is the politics surrounding the wider release of Vista and Office 2007 next year.
I don't like to feel, every time I ask someone to resend, that I am part of that.