Before last Christmas, I wrote a post about opening .docx files.  My advice then was simple – get the newest version of OpenOffice.  It’s free and it opens the new Office 2007 .docx.

School is back in session, and already I here teachers and students complaining about these incompatible file formats. Students who have new computers at home bring in their .docx Word 2007 files, and they find that they can’t open them on the computers in the school’s media center. Doh!

Teachers, to, have this problem when students e-mail in or otherwise submit papers in this new format. If you’ve upgraded to the latest version of Microsoft Office (which costs a pretty penny to get legally), you’re golden. Otherwise, you might be staring at a file you can’t open and grade.

What to do? Building on what I said last December, here are three solutions to your problem…

Ditch Microsoft Office – Get OpenOffice

My first piece of advice is to ditch the expensive, proprietary Microsoft software altogether and start using OpenOffice. OpenOffice is a free, fully-functional, open source office suite.

It comes with a word processor (Writer), presentation software (Impress), spreadsheet program (Calc), drawing program, and database engine. It’s more or less a free and legal replacement to Microsoft Office.

The newer versions of OpenOffice also have the extra benefit of being able to open all the latest files from Microsoft Office 2007. You can open a .docx file, read it, and (if you want) save it in a different file format (.doc, .odt, etc). This works great for Word documents, although OpenOffice is not as good at opening/converting Power Point slideshows. The information is retained, but much of the formatting is lost in the conversion.

Get the Compatibility Pack from Microsoft

If you really want to stick with Microsoft, but don’t want to upgrade to the latest version of Office, you can get a compatibility pack from Microsoft.

This compatibility pack will update your older version of Microsoft Office and allow it to open up the new, .docx and .pptx formats. I’ve had trouble installing it on my official school computer, though, because it wants me to have administrator access (which my log-in account does not). Our one tech coordinator is also over-whelmed with trying to service 200+ computers, so she can’t do it.

As a result, I stick with OpenOffice on the other desktops in my classroom and open the new files from there.

Convert It Online

A third alternative is to use a service like Zamzar to convert the files for you.

At Zamzar, you upload the file to their server and let them do the conversion. After a short while, you will receive an e-mail with a link to the converted file. If you have a lot of files to convert, this can be burdensome, but it’s perfectly useable for one or two files.

In addition, you can use this to convert older incompatible file types to newer ones. For example, I had a few students who had Microsoft Works at home, which uses the .wps file format. This wasn’t compatible with the Microsoft Word on my school computer or the OpenOffice Writer on my other computer. With Zamzar, I was able to convert it to a .doc file and open it.

Pick a Standard File Format

There you have it. Three alternative methods of opening and/or converting .docx files so that you can read them.

The simplest advice I have, though, is to tell your students to use a standard file format! The simplest format to use is .doc – Word 97/2000/XP. This is compatible with Microsoft Word and OpenOffice Writer. As long as the file is in this standard, universally recognized format, you won’t have trouble opening it.

Or, better yet, have them write up their document on Google Docs and read it online.