Converting and opening legacy files
Rescued from Oblivion
Can documents from the past 20 years still be opened easily today? The Linux Magazine team rummaged through some old hard disk drives and asked readers for legacy files. The documents we found caused a couple of surprises.
Everyone who was wise enough to make the move to Linux in the mid-1990s tended to write their letters and papers in StarOffice. At the time, no other alternatives provided such a broad range of functions, and it was available for free to non-commercial users. However, anyone wanting to open files that were created back then now faces a problem: OpenOffice and LibreOffice, which are based on the source code published by StarOffice around the turn of the millennium, refuse to cooperate.
In fact, in the history of the two office packages, the file format changed twice. The first OpenOffice in 2002 threw the StarOffice proprietary file format out the window and used its proprietary, but open, format named OpenOffice.org XML. The extension for text documents was SXW.
However, since OpenOffice 2, the standardized Open Document Format is now used, and text documents have an ODT extension. OpenOffice 2 was the last version that could still read and convert the old StarOffice documents with SDW extensions. Anyone wanting to save old letters in the modern era must therefore install OpenOffice 2 once again (Figure 1).
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