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Thread ID: 49881 2004-10-03 22:09:00 .sxw extensions B.M. (505) Press F1
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277969 2004-10-03 22:09:00 I’ve been sent a file with a .sxw extension and am unable to open it.

Google tells me it belongs to "open-office" but I can’t see where anything else will open it.

Are there any tricks like changing extension etc.?
B.M. (505)
277970 2004-10-03 22:24:00 Nope, not with this file. You need OpenOffice.org, an open source office suite. You can get it off (if you have it) the PC World August 2004 cover disc, buy on a disc (to spare you the download) for $5 inc. p&p from www.openoffice.org.nz or, if you have broadband, download it from http://www.openoffice.org/
I use it myself and other than having a very sparse picture gallery, is very good, as it can open and save in formats other than .sxw, such as: PDF (it does it well), .doc, and others.
Mada (248)
277971 2004-10-03 22:42:00 If you'd really rather not get OpenOffice (But you should anyways ;-)), then you have two choices I can see:
Ask the origional document creator to export it as a PDF so you can view it
Ask somebody (like myself) to convert it for you


Chill.
Chilling_Silence (9)
277972 2004-10-03 22:58:00 Or you use the file association command. Chris Randal (521)
277973 2004-10-03 23:02:00 Chris:
Nothing but OpenOffice (Well, I think koffice, abiword & staroffice are the exceptions) can read OpenOffice Formats.

Certainly Microsoft Office cant!
Chilling_Silence (9)
277974 2004-10-03 23:31:00 Your best option is probably to get the sender to resend the file in another format, preferably as an .rtf file which most word processing documents can open. tommy (2826)
277975 2004-10-03 23:55:00 > Chris:
> Nothing but OpenOffice (Well, I think koffice,
> abiword & staroffice are the exceptions) can read
> OpenOffice Formats.
>
> Certainly Microsoft Office cant!

But MS Office can open Star office docs with the same suffix, provided there is a file association set up.

I don't know about OO, but Star office has the option to save files in a .doc format - can you ask the sender to do that?
Chris Randal (521)
277976 2004-10-04 01:51:00 Thanks guys,

Yes, as this was the first time I’ve encountered the problem I took the easy way out and told the sender I couldn’t open .sxw files and back it came as a .doc.

Had me fooled as I’d never heard of sxw files, but I know now. Thought it might have been a type of shockwave until Google told me otherwise.
B.M. (505)
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