Open Office 2007 documents without Office 2007

wkwalker — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 05:00:17 +0000

There must be something about years ending in “7.” The last time Microsoft made significant changes to the file formats used by its Office suite was for the Office 97 release. They did it again for Office 2007. As Office 2007 becomes more popular, this is creating problems for people who are still using — and are perfectly happy with — older versions. It’s an issue for third-party packages, too, such as OpenOffice and WordPerfect Office.

Happily, there are solutions…

If you are using Office 2000, Office XP or Office 2003, download and install the “Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats.” It’s free for anyone to download and requires no validation nonsense. According to Microsoft, “by installing the Compatibility Pack in addition to Microsoft Office 2000, Office XP, or Office 2003, you will be able to open, edit, and save files using the file formats new to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007.” Do pay attention to the write-up on the download page, though, including the part about grabbing the latest security updates.

If you are using OpenOffice, just upgrade to the latest release (version 3.1 at the time this was written). It costs nothing and the update process is not unduly burdensome. If you’re running a fairly recent version of OpenOffice, you’ll likely be offered updates automatically.

If you are using WordPerfect Office X4 or later, you should be more or less OK. For earlier versions, contact Corel for compatibility information.

And, finally, if you’re using a non-Microsoft office suite and are not running Windows Vista or later, you’ll need the new Office 2007 fonts. See the “How to get the Office 2007 fonts” post for details.

How to get the Office 2007 fonts

wkwalker — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 00:31:47 +0000

(Note: If you need to open native-format Office 2007 documents, check out “Open Office 2007 documents without Office 2007.”)

Beginning with Office 2007 and Windows Vista, Microsoft introduced six new TrueType fonts. They are: Calibri, Cambria, Candara, Consolas, Constantia and Corbel. If you don’t have these fonts and open a document that uses them, it may not display properly. If the document is an Adobe PDF, you may, under some circumstances, see an unintelligible series of dots, accompanied by a message that one or more fonts is missing.

Fortunately, you don’t have to upgrade to the latest version of Microsoft Office, or move to Vista or Windows 7, to get the new fonts.

If you are running Windows XP or Windows 2000, but not any Office 2007 components, the easiest solution is to download and install PowerPoint Viewer 2007. The download is free and requires no validation checks. Installing the PowerPoint Viewer installs the new fonts as well. Simple.

And by the way . . .

Technically, this is a license violation but, if you want just the fonts without the PowerPoint Viewer, there is a way to do this. Here’s the general procedure:

The PowerPointViewer.exe executable is actually an archive. Extract the contents to a new folder someplace convenient. 7-Zip and PeaZip can do this, as can the venerable, but non-free, WinZip.
Take a look at the files you’ve just extracted and you’ll see yet another archive named ppviewer.cab, which contains the font files. Extract its contents.
Use the Windows Control Panel “Fonts” applet to install the new fonts from wherever you placed the contents of ppviewer.cab. (Choose the “Install New Font…” option from the the “Fonts” applet’s File menu.) Make sure the “Copy fonts to Fonts folder” option is checked.

Running Linux? See this article.

WhertRA » Microsoft Office

Open Office 2007 documents without Office 2007

How to get the Office 2007 fonts