Read DOCX Files in Internet Explorer with Microsoft Word

19 mar 2008

Use Internet Explorer as a DOCX Reader - Read DOCX Files without Microsoft Office or Word 2007.

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.

docx-reader 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.

http://techie-buzz.com Keith Dsouza

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.
http://blog.gadodia.net Vaibhav

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.
http://www.abhishekkant.net abhishek kant

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: http://openxmldeveloper.com/default.aspx
great

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.
http://thomas-gerhardt.com TomG

OR, you can just open it in google docs.
That is what I do…
Email it to yourself for just import it.
A.M.

Thank you so much, you literally saved my life!
Thank you thank you thank you
http://webworc.com Erik Plouvier

Perfect solution how to read docx files without office 2007.
Thank you.
Mark Sam

Man you’re a great guy. You save hours of my evening with that .docx reader. Stay good and be richly blessed.
http://www.bedrock.com Fred Flintstone

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
Lars

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.
flap

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.
http://www.gl3nnx.com GLenn

WOWww awesome, you amazed me on this trick. You save my time on borrowing CD of latest MSOffice to open my .docx file :)

Technology, Software and Internet

Read DOCX Files in Internet Explorer with Microsoft Word

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