[hblug] The docx problem

[Brett Wilkins]

It's the retailer/salesperson's duty to make it clear whether or not the
software installed is a trial. I know this, as I was a retailer at DSE in
Hastings for about 6-7 months. If things like that aren't made clear to
the buyer, then I think they have the right to bring it back for a full
refund of the purchase price, as they were led into the purchase thinking
it was something else. You are, of course, entitled to what you were told
you were paying for.

Now, about Office 2007 format... I think this format has just become an
ISO standard (Oh no :( ) so it is now in the same league as the Open
Document Format. I'm also aware that Microsoft has released
patches/updates for older Office releases to allow them to open/convert
docx files. I'm not completely certain what's happening on the Linux front
in this regard.

When I looked at opening a docx file myself, I found that a docx is
basically a compressed file, I think it's a zip. So just rename the docx
to zip, and you shouldbe able to at least extract the file structure, XML
etc.

Hope this helps add some clarity.
Cheers,

Brett

> chris morris wrote:
>> Don't know if anyone here has experienced this, but twice now I have
>> been sent M$ Office documents in a docx format and twice I've been
>> unable to do anything with them.
>> OpenOffice wont open them, nor will MS Word (03)
>> It seems M$ has set the default document type on Office 2007 as .docx
>> When people who buy new machines ( with Vista installed ) use the
>> pre-installed trial of Office2007 they end up saving their docs in
>> .docx format. Of course they all work properly on the host machine,
>> and on anything else that has Office2007 installed.
>> But when they email these docs to others we cant use them.
>> Its all well and good to ask people to save-as something else, but
>> many have no idea how to do that, or even know what your talking
>> about, they just hit the save button.
>>
>> Problems also occur when the trial of Office2007 expires. The user has
>> made all his/her documents in this random format and cannot access
>> them unless they buy Office 2007.
>> Thats very close to extortion, but this sort of behavior from M$
>> doesn't surprise me anymore.
>>
>> Chris
>
>
> Well actually no, its not. there is a an option to save documents as
> Word Document 97-2003 format. I now prefer saving my files as docx,
> anyway since most of the systems I work on, are Office 2007 installations.
>
> And most of the software you purchase on newer computers are trials,
> trial Norton products, trial games, perhaps Norton are doing the same
> with their security suite.
> Its the computer manufactuers who are messing people around. A person
> buys a computer, they sell it with Office 2007 and Norton Internet
> Security 2008 only to find when they have purchased the computer, the
> software they thought they were getting with it are only trials and they
> have to purchase a new copy of Office 2007 and buy another copy of
> Norton Internet Security.
> All on their new laptop that has Vista Home Basic, with 512MB RAM.
>
> And I know exactly what im talking about because I've had to sort this
> out for numerous business contacts I have, who have recently upgraded to
> a new laptop with Vista. All of whom required Office, hense Office 2007
> and then had to fork out an extra $76 for 2GB of DDR2 ram for their
> laptop where they just finished paying $1,200 for.
>
> Cameron W
>
> _______________________________________________
> HBLUG mailing list
> HBLUG at linux.net.nz
> http://www.linux.net.nz/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hblug
>