WTF is .docx and why should i care?

Microsoft has recently unveiled their lat­est ver­sion of the Office suite for the Win­dows oper­at­ing sys­tem, but they do not plan on releas­ing a Mac ver­sion for quite a while yet. “So what?” you ask. Well, they’ve gone and changed the stan­dard Word file for­mat (as in Word, the pro­gram 98% of the busi­ness world is utterly reliant on). And because this is avail­able on Win­dows but not on Mac, if some­one with this newest ver­sion of Office sends you a Word file, you will not be able to open it on your Mac. Grr…

The file exten­sion is .docx So you may see some­thing in your email inbox like “really_important_file.docx” that you can­not open.

Luck­ily the resource­ful peo­ple on the inter­webs have come to our aid. Enter the DOCX Con­verter for Office 2007. This web­site will allow you to extract the text from one of these impen­e­tra­ble “new & improved” Word files. Cons of this method: Much of the for­mat­ting is lost in the con­ver­sion and you have to read the file on your browser win­dow unless you copy and paste the text into Word.

The other, newer, Microsoft-sanctioned option is the Office Con­verter, a down­load­able pro­gram that will chew up your use­less .docx files and spit out a much more use­able .rtf file (rtf stands for Rich Text For­mat). The Rich Text file is nice because a) it works in ANY text edi­tor, and b) the rich text means that almost all text for­mat­ting will be pre­served from the orig­i­nal file.

Read on for detailed tuto­ri­als on using both of these meth­ods. Includ­ing pictures!

Option #1: Using the online DOCX Converter

Visit http://docx-converter.com/ to find the web-based DOCX con­verter tool.

This is a handy tool for on the spot file con­ver­sion. The result­ing file isn’t a file at all. After plug­ging in the per­ti­nent info on the web­page and click­ing CONVERT IT! you will be emailed a link in a mat­ter of moments (check your junk mail too) to another web­page which dis­plays the TEXT of the file (with very lit­tle of the for­mat­ting left intact). Use­ful in some instances, but not if the for­mat­ting of the doc­u­ment is impor­tant. In that case option #2 is for you.

Option #2: Using Microsoft’s DOCX Converter

The main dif­fer­ence here is that this is an appli­ca­tion that you install on your com­puter (as opposed to access­ing over the inter­net), and this con­verter will spit out an RTF file that you can then open up in any word proces­sor such as Microsoft Word, TextE­dit, NeoOf­fice, or whathaveyou. Feel free to read on for a step-by-step on installing and run­ning the Microsoft converter.

Microsoft DOCX Con­verter Installation

Fol­low this link to find Microsoft’s down­load page for their own DOCX file converter:

Microsoft’s .docx con­verter for Mac

Find this box on the down­load page and click the link as above. Down­load the file to your desk­top, it’s a rel­a­tively large file, may take a cou­ple minutes.

Once it’s done down­load­ing double-click the .dmg file to open up the installer, it’ll appear in the side­bar of the Finder win­dow as shown. Click the icon in the Finder sidebar.

Now double-click the high­lighted file, the one labeled “Install Open XML Con­verter”. The installer will ask you var­i­ous ques­tions like “Do you agree?” and “Is this OK?”, just say Yes. You may even need to pro­vide it with a pass­word or two. When the installer has fin­ished then you are ready for action.

Find some .docx files on your com­puter and right-click or control+click on one. Select Open With… and choose Office Open XML Converter.

The Office Con­verter will jump into action and leave you with an .rtf file in the same spot as the orig­i­nal. So if you started with a file in your doc­u­ments folder called “com­pany secrets.docx” You will end up with a new file in your doc­u­ments folder called “com­pany secrets.rtf”.

One last note about installing soft­ware to your com­puter. After the instal­la­tion has com­pleted be sure to eject the disk image. There is a tiny eject but­ton next to the icon of a drive. Click it, you can also now safely delete the file that you orig­i­nally down­loaded off the internet.