Word and other Office documents at DPMMS

We don't currently have any publicly available Windows machines with Word, but there are two or three programs on the Unix system which understand Word files.

Antiword

Antiword is a text-only Word file reader (although the PostScript option does attempt print out pictures). Before you can use it you will need to run antiword-setup31. Once this has been done you can use the command antiword. Type man antiword to get the full manual page.

StarOffice / OpenOffice.org

OpenOffice.org is a complete office suite, intended to rival Microsoft Office, but is available free of charge. As a complete office suite, it can read, write, edit and print Word, Excel and PowerPoint files. It also includes a database to compete with Access. It uses a lot of memory and can be slow at times.

Run it with the command
soffice filename

A few documents work better with the old version (version 1) of OpenOffice.org which is still available with the command ooffice but generally soffice filename will do a better job.

Abiword

We also have a fairly old version of Abiword which is a much quicker program that can read Word documents (but not spreadsheets) though often not very well.

Type: abiword filename.doc &

Gnumeric

Gnumeric is another spreadsheet program (again our version is a bit out out of date) that can read Excel spreadsheets.

Type: gnumeric filename.xsl &