My kid’s classmates come over to do their school projects.
Her classmate brings her project, supposedly a PowerPoint file.
Only the extension is .docx
And my PowerPoint 2003 won’t touch it!!! :fume:
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Oh, I’m in XP, FWIW.
docx is the new MS Word format for whatever the latest version is. Won’t work with older versions.
So I’m screwed here?
I mean more than usual, obviously.
yup its 2007. Send it to me I’ll open it for you and send it back as a 2003
Science fiction double feature.
docx will build a creature.
If you have OpenOffice 3.0, it can read .docx files. It can also convert them to ordinary MS Office files.
MS download site has a MS Office 2007 converter app that you install on older Office editions. The converter allows you to open .docx files (as the other MS Office 2007 files), then save them as .doc, etc.
Microsoft has Office OpenXML converters here:
microsoft.com/downloads/deta … laylang=en
And as stated above, OpenOffice.org suite can also open OpenXML documents too.
I’ve been sending those docx files to my gmail account, gmail has a documents feature that can read and edit these.
It’s a scam by MS to try to force others to upgrade unnecessarily to a new version even though the old product, which we already paid for, still works.
“try” being the operative word.
Thankfully, OpenOffice is free!
In a bind, just change the filename to .doc instead. I’d make a backup copy of the file first, just in case …
It’s PowerPoint, and changing the extension doesn’t work.
I’m downloading the MS patch now.
That sounds like a very bad idea. 
That sounds like a very bad idea. [/quote]
Funny - I’ve had to do it numerous (more than 50) times on computers not running 2007 for WORD dosuments, and have run into issues twice that I can remember. It might not be optimal, but in a bind it seems to work fine.
[quote=“Dragonbones”]It’s a scam by MS to try to force others to upgrade unnecessarily to a new version even though the old product, which we already paid for, still works.[/quote]No, We’ve gone through this in another thread when someone had exactly the same problem. Microsoft has changed from a propriety format, to an open one that others can use. They were fixing something that was broken. The tools to convert it is are free, how is that a scam?
Interesting – thanks for that info.
Actually, it’s not a powerpoint file. .docx and .doc are Microsoft Word files. A powerpoint file would be .ppt or .pptx (the new format).
As Big Fluffy Matthew said, it’s a fix. the new .___x formats are ISO standardized. Basically, they are a collection of XML files that can be read on any system. Changing it to .doc won’t help because .doc is a file FORMAT, whereas .docx is merely a container.
You can change a .docx to .zip and unzip it - you’ll get some .xml files which can be opened in Notepad, although you may not be able to read them if you aren’t familiar with .xml.
As previously mentioned, there is a free download on Microsoft’s support site to add the ability to read (but not save) the new formats in Office 2003 and older.
You can download a patch from microsoft for 2003 to open docx files
You can download a patch from microsoft for 2003 to open docx files[/quote]
Did you bother to read the thread at all beyond the first post?