Read DOCX Files in Internet Explorer - No Word 2007 Required
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
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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.
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.
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
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.
OR, you can just open it in google docs.
That is what I do…
Email it to yourself for just import it.
Thank you so much, you literally saved my life!
Thank you thank you thank you