OOXML problems? OpenOffice to the rescue!

After I received a dubious .docx -document from one client, I realized I might be in trouble. This was a new document format created by Microsoft’s Office 2007 Word. Why they chose to make it the default format is beyond me… I was almost certain OpenOffice wouldn’t be able to open that (I was still using 2.x OO), and realized I had to download a free Word document viewer and some compatibily packet before I was happily copy & pasting stuff from the document.

It seems that upcoming 3.0 release of OpenOffice is able to read the beast. Of course, they’re also advocating their own ODF document format. From what I understand, these standardised XML formats are supposed to “standardize” and create better interoperability between offices around the world. The start seems to be a bit jumpy though.