If you're not worried about the formatting, Mac OS X includes the tools you need to get at the text, and MacOSXHints reader Cole Tierney has harnessed them with an AppleScript that provides drag-and-drop convenience.

The script uses three command-line utilities to do the job:

• unzip to unpick the XML representation of the document from the rest of the file,

• perl to clean out the tags, and

• pbcopy to leave the result on the clipboard.

You can find Tierney's script here. Copy the text of the script and paste it into a new Script Editor document. Save the script and then drag a .docx file onto its icon.

But this workaround may be obsolete before Microsoft's filters appear. If some rumours are to be believed, the latest builds of Mac OS X 10.5 include a version of TextEdit that can open and save .docx files. Apple's still promising a (northern) spring 2007 release for 10.5, so which will arrive first?{moscomment}