I’ve had a few occasions where I’ve needed to read Microsoft Office 2007 documents, even though I don’t have Office 2007. There are several approaches.
Office 2007 stores it’s files and a zip archive, with xml files inside. This means that they’re somewhat human readable. I’ve used unzip to extract the file, and poked around until I found the xml file that represented the document (word/document.xml for docx). This works fairly well for Word and Power Point documents, but I’m not so sure that it would be good for Excel files.
Novell has provided a [converter](http://odf-converter.sourceforge.net) that converts Office 2007 documents to Open Office documents, and allows Office 2007 to save in Open Office format. The command line converter appears to work well, in my limited experience. Thanks to [this blog post](http://www.oooninja.com/2008/01/convert-openxml-docx-etc-in-linux-using.html), here’s how I installed it on a Fedora/RedHat system:
* “mkdir converter“
* “cd converter“
* “wget http://download.go-oo.org/red-carpet/ooo-680/sled-10-sp-i586/odf-converter-1.1-7.i586.rpm“
* “rpm2cpio odf-converter*rpm | cpio -ivd“
* “sudo cp usr/lib/ooo-2.0/program/OdfConverter /usr/local/bin“
* “cd ..“
* “rm -rf converter“
Run it as follows:
* “OdfConverter /i example.docx“
Windows users with MS Word 2000, 2002 or 2003 can install the [Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack](http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word/HA100444731033.aspx). For those without MS Word, there’s the read-only [word viewer](http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=3657CE88-7CFA-457A-9AEC-F4F827F20CAC&displaylang=en)
Mac OS X Tiger office applications reportedly open Office 2007 documents.
Mac, Linux and FreeBSD users can use an online document conversion service such as [http://www.docx2doc.com/](http://www.docx2doc.com/) and [http://docx-converter.com/](http://docx-converter.com/) — with the caveat it may be unwise to submit confidential or proprietary documents to a third party.