There are problems not because we use some lame software, but because our lesser sane friends decide to use some non-FOSS software which produces documents in some proprietary format. This has become too common since people started moving to Microsoft Office 2007 that the earlier .doc documents became a whole new challenge in the form of .docx documents.
My colleague had to face one such challenge today, while all he had was an Ubuntu box with OpenOffice. Hence, we had to make an effort to read the docx document with what’s available with us. And we founded a solution which is pretty easy to implement.
- Install libungif4g using apt or synaptic (or whatever your distribution uses)
- Download ODF Converter Integrator from here and install it
- If you had OpenOffice open during this process, just close it down and reopen it.
Now, you should be able to view .docx files in OpenOffice. I was told that it takes some time for it to load the file, which might be because it internally converts the docx file to doc and/or to odf. We encountered similar looking solutions from [1] and [2] as well, but the above one worked for us.
[1] http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Ubuntu:Gutsy#OpenOffice_add_ons
