Open docx files without Word 2007
If you were able to read my post on taming word 2007 to save files in .doc instead of .docx before using it to save anything, you probably won’t need this but chances are you didn’t. Either that or you’ve had experienced trying to open a .docx file on a version of Word that did not have a compatibility pack installed or simply does not support docx files.
The easiest way out is to use an online conversion tool but it’s quite useless if you don’t have the computer connected to the internet. instead of looking a way to install Office 2007 though, here’s a simple process to open the docx file with Internet Explorer.
- Change the file extension of your docx file to .zi. Note that file extensions are usually hidden so you may need to enable the option to display it. On any Explorer window, go to Tools > Folder Options > View and look for the option for Hiding known file extensions.
- Extract the contents of this zip file using 7zip or any other unzip utility.
- Open the “word” folder in the extracted files and you should see a file called document.xml.
- Open document.xml inside Internet Explorer and there you have the full text of your docx document.
- Any images or charts on the document, they’ll be available under a sub-folder called media.
Note that with this conversion, any formatting on the document will be gone but at least you get what’s on it.
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