How to Open Any Document?

Most users have to deal with document files every day. There's electronic spreadsheets, papers written in word processors, dynamic presentations, and a myriad of other digital documents. And not everything on the Internet is encoded in HTML either -- sometimes you'll run into PDFs and other document formats. So how can we deal with these various, often incompatible file types with minimum hassle? Read on to find out.

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First, lets take a quick look at what file types you are likely to encounter :

 

- .doc, .docx, .pptx, .xls and so on -- documents created using applications that are part of Microsoft Office, like Word, PowerPoint and Excel. Many of these formats are proprietary, though the newest version of MS Office uses "open" file formats.

 

- PDF -- a.k.a Portable Document Format is a very widespread format created by Adobe.

 

- .odt, .ods, .odp and others -- collectively known as the OpenDocument format, these are the filename extensions used by OpenOffice applications. While not nearly as common as, say, Word documents, OpenDocument files are slowly becoming more popular (for example, GoogleDocs can export to .odt).

 

So is there any application that could open all of the above, without any added hassle of looking for special-purpose viewers and converters? One could, of course, install all of the aforementioned software and open each document in it's "native" program. However, while this may seem like an easy and common-sense choice, you would soon find that installing and maintaining a lot of diverse tools gets pretty cumbersome. Also, for commercial applications, upgrades aren't exactly free, so you might eventually run into a situation where costs accumulate to unacceptable levels.

 

Unfortunately there isn't, as of this moment, a single program that could reliably handle each and every document file format. However, there is one that comes very close - the free OpenOffice suite. OpenOffice includes applications for word processing, presentation, spreadsheets and so on. It natively supports all the OpenDocument formats and also supports all of the Microsoft Office formats. And yes, even the brand new .docx (and similar) document formats introduced in the latest versions of MS Office can be opened by OpenOffice applications with no problems.

 

But what about PDF? On one hand, there is an experimental extension for OpenOffice that allows importing and editing PDF files. It is reported to work well, but since it still hasn't been added to the official package it's likely there is a handful of bugs remaining. Therefore an external PDF viewer may be a better solution. In particular, I recommend Foxit Reader. It is much faster than Adobe PDF Viewer, has a smaller download size and uses less system resources.

 

In conclusion, while there may not be a single software that can open every document format in existence, the OpenOffice package is a very good (and free) approximation of that ideal. Contact www.paragonsystems.com

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