OOXML to ODF

.docx | .xlsx | .pptx

Those three extension is for the somewhat new MS Office 2007 (the one with ribbon interface), but lucky me I have yet to receive any email with such attachment :D

Anyway, by default OpenOffice.org 2.x cannot open those files (OO.o 3 will have that capability), so as a workaround, we can use OdfConverter from Novell's SuSE.

NOTE: I'm using Linux Mint 4 (based on Ubuntu Gutsy)

So download one of the rpm package (most probably will be the i386).

Then open the rpm with Archive Manager, and copy out /usr/lib/ooo-2.0/program/OdfConverter to /usr/bin (might need to sudo)

Then run OdfConverter from a console

$ OdfConverter

AND, I was hit by a surprise : 

OdfConverter: error while loading shared libraries: libtiff.so.3: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

a quick look inside /usr/lib yields that I have libtiff.so.4

so just do this :

$ sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libtiff.so.4 /usr/lib/libtiff.so.3

(create a symbolic link to fool OdfConverter that we have libtiff version 3 :D)

So, our OdfConverter will now works..

$ OdfConverter

Error when parsing command line: Input is missing

Usage: OdfConverter.exe /I PathOrFilename [/O PathOrFilename] [/BATCH-ODT] [/BATCH-DOCX] [/V] [/OPEN] [/XSLT Path] [/NOPACKAGING] [/SKIP name] [/REPORT Filename] [/LEVEL Level]

FIN

p/s: why is it OdfConverter.exe? :P