Microsoft Word.... Must I purchase Office to get it?

Don't get me wrong, I don't really want it, don't like it. Most of what I do is done in things like Edit Pad.

But through the years I have accumulated thousands of Word Documents. I just got a new computer, still have access to my old one via KVM switch.

But eventually I am going to have to deal with the fact that I must load my Word docs on my new computer.

Is there any way to get Word except via Office? It used to be in Works, but it isn't now.

Any way to transfer them en masse to Open Office? Or just have to do it one at a time.

Open Office will open word.docs and I assume that means that you don't need to change file extensions unless you need to save in OO format.

On my older computer...

I opened Open Office, chose file > open> and then chose a old Word doc from 1999. It opened fine, I saved it as a OO file under file > save as. It saved the same.

I then did the same to a Word doc from 2005...and it did equally well. They go into the same folder as an Open Office file right under the Word file by the same name.

I need to see if I can create a new folder to send them to. Sure could take a long time one by one.

I will just have to start with the ones I need first.

Try this:

http://leapon.net/en/mso2ooo-batch-convert-microsoft-office-documents-openoffice-documents

There are a lot of other things you can do with OpenOffice via the command line. It's quite versatile.

thanks!

... of all types of things on both Windows and Linux platforms, so I keep a collection of utilities (or at least links to them) and scripts I've written that use those utilities handy.

?

It's not a one-click solution, but it's certainly better than opening each document separately and saving it in another format, especially if you have a large number of files to convert.

It does require some setup. As mentioned in the other thread, I wasn't think about your using Vista. The basics of this are the same, but you may have some Vista specific things you need to do, which I'll detail.

The instructions on that page are pretty standard, but let me see if I can give some more detail that doesn't weave in Linux-specific stuff.

You will have to have Python installed on your machine. You can get it HERE. It's just a scripting language. Download and install as an administrator on Vista. That should set the file association for a .py script so that all you have to do is double click on it.

The mso2ooo download is a zip file with three files in it. One is the configuration file, which is just a plain text file. The second is a .py (Python) script. The third is an OpenOffice Macro.

Steps:

1) Extract all mso2ooo into its own folder. It can be anywhere. Placing it on the desktop for the time being will speed things up.

2) Either copy all the .doc files you want to convert into the mso2ooo directory or edit the configuration file and replace the "." with the path to the directory with the .doc files in it, e.g. C:\Documents and Settings\Your Name\Desktop\docs to convert\

Note: The only purpose of this script is to generate a list of files to be converted. It's simply easier to do this than create a text file manually with the path to each and every file.

3) Double-click the .py script, and it will run and generate a fourth file. You don't need to do anything to this. It is simply a list of all the files to be converted that the macro will use.

4) Make sure macros are enabled in Writer (Security > Macros), then double-click on mso2000.odt and let it do its thing.

5) The screen that opens will display the path of the file being converted. When it's done, it's just done and doesn't do anything special. You can then look in the directory where the files were, and you'll see a copy of the .doc (or PowerPoint or Excel) files in their respective open formats.

A possible Vista related issue might be Word 2007 files if you have any of those. I haven't tried this with that version of Word docs. At the very least, to convert 2007 files, you'd have to edit the config file to include the Office 2007 specific extensions. The way it is configured initially is for doc, xls, and ppt files.

Tomorrow I will download Open Office, and then experiment with this.

Thank goodness for people who come up with stuff like this.