Thank goodness for opening legacy formats

users
#1

Today I downloaded a 2006-ish C++ teacher's guide saved using the .sxw file format.

The format shows OpenOffice.org 1.0 text document, in Caja file manager [Ubuntu MATE].

I remember using OOo 1.x and the only issues were not MS Office 97-2003 formats were not supported. I loved it when I was able to read/write .doc files, since I was transitioning from Windows to Linux and MSO 2003 to a free open-source office suite.

Today was the first time in 7 or 8 years that I had to open a .sxw file. Thank goodness LO still have support with those file formats. MSO no longer supports their early file formats, so I had to make sure I re-saved all my early Word, WordPerfect, etc. documents to the more "modern" formats [Word 95 floppy era].

I never thought I would find/download .sxw files again.

To be honest, I lost a lot of documents because I could not find a working copy of the word processor that I created them with - i.e. before or early Windows software.

#2

Well sure. But remember, even if some of the "legacy" deprecated document
formats are eventually removed The Document Foundation sponsors an archive
of prior LibreOffice project release builds.

http://downloadarchive.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/old/

So you are covered either way :slight_smile:

#3

Quoting Tim---Kracked_P_P---webmaster <webmaster@krackedpress.com>:

Today I downloaded a 2006-ish C++ teacher's guide saved using the .sxw file format.

The format shows OpenOffice.org 1.0 text document, in Caja file manager [Ubuntu MATE].

I remember using OOo 1.x and the only issues were not MS Office 97-2003 formats were not supported. I loved it when I was able to read/write .doc files, since I was transitioning from Windows to Linux and MSO 2003 to a free open-source office suite.

Today was the first time in 7 or 8 years that I had to open a .sxw file. Thank goodness LO still have support with those file formats. MSO no longer supports their early file formats, so I had to make sure I re-saved all my early Word, WordPerfect, etc. documents to the more "modern" formats [Word 95 floppy era].

I never thought I would find/download .sxw files again.

To be honest, I lost a lot of documents because I could not find a working copy of the word processor that I created them with - i.e. before or early Windows software.

Hi Tim,

I can't remember the name of it right now, but there's a free software project that specifically aims to maintain the ability to read a great whack of legacy formats for cases such as you describe. Libre office and other sw use their work to import. Sounds boring as hell to me but the kind of thing that when you need it you need it bad.

Dave

#4

Thanks Stuart. I normally keep my old RPM files, this clears up a lot of disk space :slight_smile:

#5

V Stuart Foote wrote:

> Well sure. But remember, even if some of the "legacy" deprecated document
> formats are eventually removed The Document Foundation sponsors an archive
> of prior LibreOffice project release builds.
>
> http://downloadarchive.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/old/
>
> So you are covered either way :slight_smile:

Until your current O.S. no longer supports these old releases, or your current hardware no longer supports the relevant O.S. releases, or the relevant older hardware is no longer available :slight_smile:

#6

Yes, "until your current OS. . . ." and old hardware available are two real qualifiers. I no longer have a working floppy drive [internal or external ones] to read any files on either two standard sizes of floppies.

Whenever I find a legacy format, I do my best to save/export the file to a more usable format.

examples;

1] I saved the two .sxw files, that I downloaded yesterday, to the .odt format.

2] As long as MS Office still reads/writes .doc [and other 97-2003 formats] I will be using it to send word processing documents to MS Office users - not .docx. For those users, they have several different versions of MS Office from 2007 to the latest version[s]. So using .docx, currently, may not be the most compatible for this example.

After OpenOffice.org went to 3.x, I made sure all of my .sxw files were converted to the .odt format.

I was surprised that some web sites still had .sxw files [plus some had pdf versions] as their only editable file format of their "educational" work. The books I downloaded were in .sxw so I really think the creator[s] really loved OOo. Also it was also a warning of potentially outdated information.