See How Easily You Can Open Microsoft Office 2007/2008 Files

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Regina wants to know how she can open Microsoft Office 2007/2008 files. For those of you who haven’t yet run into this problem, Microsoft changed its file format for its popular Word, Excel, and PowerPoint programs. You’ll now notice that the extension to each file includes an “x” at the end. For example, Resume.doc becomes Resume.docx in the newest file format.

It’s true that if you use the older version of Microsoft Office 2004 for the Mac (or even Office 2003 for Windows), the programs, as originally shipped, did not include a way to open the newest files. Luckily, there are many ways you can open these.

Opening the Files in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard

If you have Apple’s newest operating system, you can open the newest files directly because the translators for these files are built-into the operating system. Of course, without some extra software, the only application built-into the Mac that can edit these files is TextEdit, and it can only open Microsoft Word files. You can edit the files and even re-save them as Word files. But what can you do if you need to open Excel or PowerPoint 2008 files? We need some other software…

Getting Free (Or Not So Free) Office Applications

First of all, if you want genuine Microsoft Office software, you can buy Microsoft Office 2008 for the Mac. It supports all the current Microsoft Office formats.

If you’d like to try alternative software, there are several choices. The two most popular, in my opinion, are NeoOffice and OpenOffice. OpenOffice is a free office suite that was initially developed by Sun Microsystems under the name StarOffice. Sun released the majority of the source code used to make the software, and the OpenOffice.org team of developers around the world continue developing the code and making periodic releases. The latest version, 3, is the first to have a native Mac version.

NeoOffice has been developed for several years, and it is based on the OpenOffice source code. Because there was no native version of OpenOffice for the Mac until 2008, the NeoOffice developers were the only ones bringing this type of office suite to Mac users. Thus, the suites are similar but are definitely not the same.

A couple of caveats: NeoOffice’s source code is a heavily-modified version of OpenOffice. As such, it is still based on version 2 of OpenOffice, not 3. That being said, there are many Mac-specific features in NeoOffice that OpenOffice lacks, such as Microsoft VBA scripting (which Microsoft removed from Office 2008). There is support for the newest Office XML files, but it is not built-in (it requires a 3rd-party extension). You can download NeoOffice here.

OpenOffice, on the other hand, has support for Office XML files built-in, but it can only read the file format, not save the format. This shouldn’t be a problem for most users, since they can still save those files as the previous Office 97-2004 format, and the newest version of Office on both Mac and Windows can read the format. The other caveat is that OpenOffice 3 is for Intel Macs only (at least officially). You can download OpenOffice 3 here.

Another option, and the one I generally use (though I have OpenOffice on my machine, especially so I can import WordPerfect files) is iWork. Both iWork ‘08 and iWork ‘09 support the newest Office XML files. Pages will read Word, Numbers will read Excel, and Keynote will read PowerPoint. I prefer the interface to iWork, so that’s what I use.

A Good Solution for Office 2004 Users

If you’re like Regina, and you already own Microsoft Office 2004, Microsoft has released a free Office XML converter utility. This little program does nothing other than convert the newest file format to the regular Office 2004 format that your version of Office can read. Just like the programs above, you can save the changes to the files in the 2004 format and give them back to your colleagues. You can download the converter here (direct link for the English version).

This is an incomplete list of solutions for reading and writing Office XML files. Is there another solution you prefer? Do you have other tips for people in the same predicament as Regina? Let others know in the comments.

Tagged as: apple, mac, Microsoft, Office