One of my daughters is a student in another city and writes:

"I'm having trouble opening some of the word & powerpoint files my teachers are posting online. They all seem to end in .docx or .ppsx (or .pptx or something like that). At any rate, they end in X and my computer doesn't like them... The IT people said I need some kind of document converter because apparently my teachers are using a newer version of Office. Do you know anything about these converters?? Someone suggested "Open Office", but I'm wary of downloading something I don't know anything about."

Any help will be appreciated. Some urgency here.

ryck

Her machine is a 13" Intel Macbook (White). I believe she is running either 10.5.6 or 10.5.8 Her software is Office 2004.

Would that be Microsoft Open XML Converter ?

Or here's another one.

Plus, there's this one.

Or one from a Microsoft page.

I think you're right. I've had a chance to do a bit of reading while I wait for my daughter to send a couple of files so that I can try it out. She must be in class.

I want to make sure it works because, to complicate matters, she's in the middle of a move from one house to another and doesn't yet have Internet. She needs to use the neighbour's connection so I don't want her to have to waste a lot of their time.

ryck

Rest assured - it works. I have been using it many times.

NeoOffice will open edit and save those files for you with no difficulty.

FWIW: My wife uses the MS XML Converter and found that it works seamlessly and without issue.

I’m glad to hear that your dealings with MS’ XML Converter have been satisfactory. Unfortunately, that is not everyone’s experience, mostly likely because of specific (and apparently problematic) document properties beyond the converter's capabilities. For those cases in which you yourself might be confronted with conversion issues it’s good to know about alternative options, especially those of the free variety.

So true. After I switched to Office 2008 on one machine, some of my old docs with pictures from PPT embedded in text boxes show weird colors. And this is backward compatibility... The forward one, using the converter, may also have problems (personally, have not seen any yet), but I suspect they would be primarily related to PPT.

FYI, the last time I tried MS XML Converter, it choked on the dumbest thing. I was wondering why it wasn't converting some .DOCX files I received. Well apparently it could only deal with .docx files and not .DOCX files. I use 2008 now so I don't know if that's still the case, but I shouldn't could believe it couldn't handle capitalized file extensions.

Is that a variation of the southern expression "might could"? (Most likely your Editor was unavailable.)

You don't say whether changing .DOCX to .docx solved the problem. Inquiring minds want to know.

I manually created a DOCX document, attached to an email, and then sent it to my wife in hopes it would fail when she attempted to open it. Alas, her converter (installed via the MS AutoUpdate) worked as designed.

Perhaps her success is a consequence of the original document being created on my Mac and the DOCX being manually appended. The MS default for file extensions is lower case and cannot be changed on my machine, or I would have tried that.

The sooner I can break her machine, the sooner she gets mine, and I get a new one.

shouldn't could - late night... brain broken

Yes renaming the docx files did the trick, but it wasn't the first thing to come to mind. This was a while back so I wouldn't be surprised if they fixed the issue by this point.

Well, Microsoft's "converter" program is only about 40 megabytes (at least that's what the download measures).

If it was expected to handle uppercase and lowercase extensions, then it would probably measure well over 100 megs.

[kidding... but i can't believe how HUGE the item was, just for a file converter? ]

If you created the .docx document from Word 2004 or earlier, no matter which suffix you used, it could have been treated as the 2004 .doc. Again, the converter works well for me. One might like to update it to the latest version.
For those interested, the Office 2008 special media edition (with Exchange support for Entourage and all four major apps; I have it and it works well) is running on e-bay for USD 120-140 as "buy it now" (no auction), which is a pretty good price. Unfortunately, it is for one machine only.

Other folks have talked about the XML converter, but if I were in your shoes, I would take a different approach.

I would talk to the teachers. "Thank you for posting these files online, but you might not be aware of the fact that you are accidentally making files that not everyone can read.

You are using a brand-new version of Microsoft Office. You might not know this, but the new version of Microsoft Office creates files that other people can not use. You can change your settings in your version of Office in order to create files that everyone can use. The Office Help shows you step by step what settings to change. You only have to change the settings once and from then on your copy of Office will make files that everyone can read.

There's an easy way to tell. Look at the last letters of the files you are saving. If the last letter in the name of the file is X, Office is telling you that it is saving a file that not everyone can read."

I think you're right and I will talk to my daughter about it.

In the meantime, to get her 'up and running' I've had her install the XML Converter, which is working well. (And thanks everyone else in the thread for your ideas. They are appreciated.)

Talking to the teachers has considerable merit as it solves the dilemma for everyone .....and who knows what problems are being caused for students who can't "Check with Dad"?

I find it interesting, but not unexpected, that the IT department didn't offer this solution instead of saying "some kind of document converter" is needed. In fact I would think that, since this is a university, the machines are probably university assets which means the IT department probably installs the software and upgrades.

Therefore you'd think it' s incumbent on IT people, for the good of the entire student population, to change the settings whenever they do installs for anyone - teaching or administrative staff.

ryck

Glad it worked! Concerning "check with Dad". This is what I try to teach my 20-year old so he should not check with Dad at every minor glitch: first, there is Google and more often than not you can find the answer there. So many people do not even think about this source. Second, anybody can join this forum and ask for advice directly. We have no age limitations for members!

I'm afraid your expectation would be wrong more often than not. University IT departments tend to be no different than IT departments in other enterprises: frequently understaffed they often do what's best and easiest for themselves. Exceptions may be allowed for the boss (albeit reluctantly), while other users have to 'adapt'. I regularly see IT people recommend replacing computers (!) they don't want to troubleshoot for a variety of reasons, not all of which make sense for the user.

In this particular case, making sure that the source of the documents (teachers etc.) is on board with the best format choice seems the most efficacious.