How to open Microsoft Word documents in Linux
In an office or production environment, sharing documents between different applications and operating systems is a common issue. If you need to create, open, and edit Microsoft Word documents in Linux, you can use LibreOffice Writer or AbiWord. Both are robust word processing applications that read and write files in Word .doc and .docx formats.
If you need command-line tools that extract the text from Word files, Antiword (.doc files) and docx2txt (.docx) are useful programs to have at your disposal.
In this tutorial, we’ll look at these four applications and how you can use them. We’ll walk through installing them on several of the most popular Linux distributions, including Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE, CentOS, and Arch Linux. We’ll also help with installing the core Microsoft TrueType fonts on your Linux system.
LibreOffice
LibreOffice is a free, open-source, actively maintained and frequently updated office productivity suite that is compatible with Microsoft Office applications, including Microsoft Word. You can save your LibreOffice Writer documents in .doc or .docx format, and then either opens correctly in Microsoft Word.
Installing LibreOffice
LibreOffice can be installed using your package manager. To install it, open a terminal and use the following command appropriate for your operating system:
Debian 8, Ubuntu 15
Fedora 23
OpenSUSE 10
CentOS 7
Arch Linux 2016
Once LibreOffice is installed, it should appear in the Applications menu of your GUI. You can also run it from a terminal with the command:
AbiWord
AbiWord is another free and open-source word processor. It has a clean, simple interface developed for almost twenty years. Like LibreOffice, it can open, edit, and save Microsoft Word .doc and .docx files. Unlike LibreOffice, Abiword is not a complete office suite, so it has a smaller footprint and consumes fewer system resources.
Installing AbiWord
Debian 8, Ubuntu 15
Fedora 23
OpenSUSE 10
CentOS 7
Arch Linux 2016
Antiword
Antiword is a command-line tool that converts the contents of a .doc file to plain text.
Antiword only converts .doc files. If you need to convert a .docx file, see docx2txt in the next section.
Using Antiword
Running antiword with the name of a Word .doc file outputs the plain text of the file to standard output.
Antiword does a great job of formatting tables. It also has options for including images as PostScript objects and outputting to PDF.
You can redirect the output to a text file:
Or, if you want to open it directly in a text editor, you can pipe the text to vim:
Installing antiword
Debian 8, Ubuntu 15
Fedora 23
OpenSUSE 10
CentOS 7
Docx2txt
Docx2txt is a command-line tool that converts .docx files to plain text. (It does not convert .doc files.)
To print the contents of a .docx file to the terminal screen or a file, call docx2txt and specify a dash as the output file name. In this example, notice the dash at the end of the command.
To convert a .docx file and output to a text file, use the command form:
To open the .docx text in vim, use the command form:
To open it in nano:
To install doc2txt, follow the instructions for your version of Linux below:
Debian 8
Ubuntu 15
Fedora 23
Fedora’s repositories do not offer a package for docx2txt, but you can install it manually:
Download the source from SourceForge’s docx2txt page. Extract the archive:
You need to make sure that perl, unzip and make are installed on your system, so install or upgrade those packages now:
Then, run make as the root user to install:
Docx2txt is now installed as docx2txt.sh. For instance, to convert the file word-document.docx to a text file, you can run:
The converted text file automatically saves as word-document.txt.
OpenSUSE 10
SUSE repositories do not offer a package for docx2txt, but you can download it from SourceForge’s docx2txt page. Extract the archive:
You need to make sure that perl, unzip and make are installed on your system, so install or upgrade those packages now:
Then, run make as root to install:
Docx2txt is now installed as docx2txt.sh. For instance, to convert the file word-document.docx to a text file, you can run:
The converted text file is automatically saved as word-document.txt.
CentOS 7
CentOS repositories do not offer a package for docx2txt, but you can download it from SourceForge’s docx2txt page. Extract the archive:
You need to make sure that perl, unzip and make are installed on your system, so install or upgrade those packages now:
Then, run make as root to install:
Docx2txt is now installed as docx2txt.sh. For instance, to convert the file word-document.docx to a text file, you can run:
The converted text file is automatically saved as word-document.txt.
Arch Linux 2016
Installing Microsoft-compatible fonts
The core Microsoft fonts are available on Linux. Install them if you are going to be working with Microsoft Word files — especially if they were created on a Windows system. The core fonts include:
- Andale Mono
- Arial
- Arial Black
- Calabri
- Cambria
- Comic
- Courier
- Impact
- Times
- Trebuchet
- Verdana
- Webdings
To install them, follow these steps:
Debian 8, Ubuntu 15
Fedora 23
Install packages required for installation:
Then install the local RPM package:
OpenSUSE 10
Install packages required for installation:
Then install the local RPM package:
CentOS 7
Install packages required for installation:
Then install the local RPM package:
Arch Linux 2016
Install packages required for installation:
Extract the contents of the local RPM package:
This command extracts the raw contents of the RPM file and creates two directories, etc and usr that correspond to your /etc and /usr directories. The font files themselves are located in usr/share/fonts/msttcore.
Microsoft office viewer on Linux
I am working in a big non-private hospital where we want to convert to open-source starting with office/productivity software and then installing Linux.
Microsoft is all over and even if we could switch to LibreOffice we foresee difficulties reading/parsing correctly 5-10% of MS proprietary documents.
With SaaS and even desktop based software there are now all kinds of newcomers and I haven’t been able to figure out if there are any new solutions to at least view these 5-10% documents without skewed results (misplaced graphics etc)?
Google Drive is a great alternative but does not allow documents to be viewed without user account. So for browser based solutions we’d need a solution which uses non-user based login eg. IP address or general/common login for all hospital staff. Best of all — installed locally.
3 Answers 3
You can definitely use Kingsoft Office, it’s highly compatible with MS Office file formats and offers a tab view to open multiple documents in the same window.
I was in situation when I wanted to view proprietary office file (Academic) but Libreoffice 4.2 wasn’t up-to the task, since the issues were the same as yours — misplaced graphics, or text. Running a virtual machine just to open a file didn’t seem to me a good idea as that makes the system feel bulky. Wine has a good support for Ubuntu but you’re on your own for an OS like Slackware.
Enough commentary, regardless of anything said above, amongst the contenders on WebStore the best (requiring no Internet access) I found was this extension for Chromium (Google Chrome also):
Description and Features
View and edit Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files — without needing Office installed on your computer.
Once the extension is installed, Office files that you drag into Chrome, open in Gmail, Google Drive, and more, will be opened in Docs, Sheets, and Slides for viewing and editing.
You can save each file back to its original Office format, or convert it to Docs, Sheets, or Slides to unlock more features, like inviting others to edit with you, commenting, chat, and more.
Formats supported: .doc , .docx , .xls , .xlsx , .ppt , .pptx
Note: If the presentation files have animation then the animation wouldn’t work. The extension can view the files locally, but requires Google Drive access to edit. This extension IMO is upto the task as I tested .doc , .docx , .pptx , .xls files and most of them worked fine for reading. Also, since the title of the question asked for a viewer, I assume this extension meets the demand.
Libre formats (office) didn’t work in this extension.