Digging into .docx with Mac OS X

Stephen Withers
Monday, 11 December 2006 13:45

Your IT - Home IT

So, you're using a Mac, someone's sent you a Word 2007 .docx document and you can't wait until next April or so for Microsoft to provide a file converter for Office 2004 so you can read it. What do you do?

You could ask the sender or a Windows-using colleague to resave it as a .doc file and send that to you, but that's worryingly close to an admission of defeat that calls into question your skills and choice of computer.

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?