Earlier tonight, my daughter tried opening a .docx file she had created at school. Her computer has an older version of Microsoft Office (2003 I think), and of course it didn’t open. Having run into this problem before, I downloaded and installed the Microsoft Office Compatibility pack. That didn’t work either…

I took a copy of the file to my computer (it runs Ubuntu) and tried to open it. OpenOffice.org Writer didn’t open it either. My friend Google led to many sites with alleged solutions for my problem.  None worked, until I found this post. It was easy, and worked like a charm.

Here’s what you do. Download this and extract the files. The README.txt file has all the information you need, but here’s the steps.

Open a terminal, cd into the directory where the extracted files are, and run the following commands:

sudo cp OdfConverter /usr/lib/openoffice/program/

sudo cp MOOXFilter_cpp.xcu /usr/lib/openoffice/share/registry/modules/org/openoffice/TypeDetection/Filter/

sudo cp MOOXTypeDetection.xcu /usr/lib/openoffice/share/registry/modules/org/openoffice/TypeDetection/Types/