Question: How do you quickly read a docx document on some computer that has no Microsoft Office Word 2007 and is neither connected to the Internet (online conversion is therefore ruled out).
Solution: No worries, you can make a docx reader out of Internet Explorer or any other text editor (like notepad) - just follow these steps:
Step 1: Change the file extension of your docx file to .zip (hello.docx -> hello.zip)
Step 2: Extract the contents of this zip file locally using Winzip or any other unzip utility.
Step 3: Open the “word” folder in the extracted files and you should see a file called document.xml.
Open document.xml inside Internet Explorer and there you have the full text of your docx document.
If there are any images or charts, they’ll be available under a sub-folder called media.
Though you get to read the text without formatting, it’s still a useful technique to know.
Related: Download Word 2007 Viewer for DOCX
Find this article at: http://www.labnol.org/software/tutorials/docx-reader-open-docx-files-internet-explorer/2637/
web: http://www.labnol.org/ email: amit@labnol.org
Reader Comments
This is a excellent tip and will come in very useful in situations.
On the other hand this is also possible because they follow XML standards which can allow the data to be viewed and accessed easily.
Written by Keith Dsouza on 03.19.08
What’s interesting is how it converts my 2.5 Megabytes DocX file to a folder which is 13 megabytes (with the images taking 10 MB).
Also, useful sure, but practical no. The document.xml in my case was a huge XML with mostly nodes around formatting (I think), with content that I had typed up available but hard to locate.
However, I concede that knowing this tidbit will definitely help me someday (these little techniques always do).
Thanks.
Written by Vaibhav on 03.19.08
this is what the default format of Office 2007 is - OpenXML. OpenXML stores data in simple zip format whose specification is publically available.
you can not only read Word 2007 in this way but Excel and powerpoint as well :)
read more about OpenXML here: link
Written by abhishek kant on 03.20.08
thanks for this tips. i recently came to find a docx file but doesn’t know what program it belongs to and how to open it.
Written by great on 03.20.08
OR, you can just open it in google docs.
That is what I do…
Email it to yourself for just import it.
Written by TomG on 03.22.08
Thank you so much, you literally saved my life!
Thank you thank you thank you
Written by A.M. on 04.06.08
Perfect solution how to read docx files without office 2007.
Thank you.
Written by Erik Plouvier on 05.26.08
Man you’re a great guy. You save hours of my evening with that .docx reader. Stay good and be richly blessed.
Written by Mark Sam on 09.02.08
This is one of the best ms office tips/tricks that I’ve seen in a very long time — *very* helpful, thanks so much Amit.
-Fred
Written by Fred Flintstone on 12.06.08
good tip but it turned out really messy with all coding, i found the phonenumber i was looking for thou so thx for that!
when i googled the problem later i found the Zoho writer which is really useful since its free and web based.
Written by Lars on 01.28.09
THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU!!!!!! I have tried a ton of stuff, including downloading the ‘Compatibilty pack….’ which did not work for me. Your information is priceless and when I win the lottery you are on my list.
Written by flap on 02.03.09
WOWww awesome, you amazed me on this trick. You save my time on borrowing CD of latest MSOffice to open my .docx file :)
Written by GLenn on 04.01.09