Formatted .docx conversion for Mac

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 21 December 2006 04:28

Your IT - Home IT

The company behind icWord has provided Mac OS X users with the most accurate conversion tool for Word 2007's .docx files we've seen so far.

Several developers have offered quick and dirty utilities - often harnessing standard Mac OS X functionality - allowing extraction of the text from a .docx file, but those we've previously examined preserve little or no formatting.

Panergy's docXConverter outputs an RTF document that can be opened by most word processing and desktop publishing programs, including Word 2004 and v.X. The company claims the content and form of the original document are preserved, including character and paragraph styling, tables, headers and footers, graphics, and  comments and hidden text. Plain text can be produced for programs that can't handle RTF.

Not having Office 2007 on our Windows PC, we had to rely on sample .docx files provided with the application or downloaded from various web sites. The results were mixed: docXConverter refused to recognise that some were .docx files at all, but the supported features did seem to be handled correctly in the documents that were converted.

docXConverter is almost transparent in use as it automatically passes its output to the selected application, which defaults to Microsoft Word.

Take advantage of the 20 conversion or 20 day free trial period to check whether docXConverter can handle the Word 2007 files you're receiving before shelling out the $US19.95 to fully activate the program.