Opening Office 2007 files: On-line

Late this afternoon I was asked to print a document of one of our team leaders which will be use tomorrow. I was bit surprised that it was saved in office 2007. Since almost all of our units were installed with office 2003 and i know it's quite bothering situation for non-techie person. Actually, the first option for opening these files is installing FileConverter or Compatibility pack from Microsoft.

Being a Google fanatic, i decided first to upload it to Goole docs so that i can easily copy the content and have it paste to my MsWord 2003. Unfortunately Google docs does not allow .docx extension or files saved in office 2007.

So here's what i did, of course i Google with this keyword "online docx opener". As expected, you will have a lot of result and basically as Google searcher you will choose the first or second entry or in general the first few entries in first page of the result.

I chose this entry because of its tag "free docx opener". According to the site, you can use Thinkfree or Zoho to open Docx, Xlsx, Pptx, Ppsx files or saved in office 2007 version.

From the two, i preferred to use Zoho because of its GUI (grapics user interface), very user friendly and it really looks like a desktop word processor. Much user friendly than Google docs actually. =)
On the other hand, ThinkFree is also useful because upon uploading your file, you can immediately view and have it printed.


Think of it like an on-line PDF format but the option on copying the text in original version/format is very different. Based on my experience when i pasted it in word processor, it paste a series of character without even a space on it. Another thing, i once tried to edit a document file but it asks me first to verify a java application on my desktop. When i first saw the window, i felt like that application will be somehow slower compare to Zoho writer. That's make decide not to use ThinkFree.com (really sorry guys..)

So here's my recommendation, install a fileconverter/compatibility pack from Microsoft if you are frequently opening files from office 2007 to 2003. But if you have at least 376Kbps internet connection like mine, you can use webbased document processor like Zoho writer or Google docs.Somehow you will find that using webbased applications like Zoho or Google docs quite convenient.

Reminder: Google is not yet allowing office 2007 files.