I work for an organization that has a fairly old server running some critical apps. We have a road map to move these applications to a new server, but have to support the existing one for the time being.
I am running into an issue opening up .docx files on this server. I have Office 2003 installed (server is a Windows 2000 SP4 machine w/ ~1GB of RAM). I have downloaded the Office compatibility pack from Microsoft and did the regsvr32 %SystemRoot%\system32\ole32.dll command when I received the error message There was an error opening the file.
This did not fix the issue and so I'm stuck with getting the There was an error opening the file message anytime I try to open the .docx file. The file has 2 pictures in it and I believe it was created in Office 2010, if either of those facts are helpful.
What am I missing?
84 Answers
Since it's Windows 2000, you may have to get the MS XML services added as well.
You can get it from Microsoft:
Microsoft Core XML Services (MSXML) 6.0
1What seems to have worked for me is re-running the Office 2003 Setup from the Disk or folder where it was stored. This did work - but doing "repair" from the "Installed programs" control panel did not work - neither did "repairing" the compatibility pack.
The latest version of the Office Compatibility Pack is not compatible with Windows 2000. You must uninstall it and then install one of the previous versions (either version 1 or version 2 will work with Windows 2000). But first, since you are running Office 2003, you must install Office 2003 SP3 before installing the Office Compatibility Pack. After installing Office 2003 SP3, and after installing the older version of the Office Compatibility Pack, you must not install any of the Office Compatibility Pack Service Packs - none of them are compatible with Windows 2000.
If you still encounter problems after installing the older version, it may be necessary to remove other Office 2007/2010 components from your system before it works. For example, I had to uninstall Visio Viewer 2007 from my Windows 2000 machine and then re-install the older Office Compatibility Pack before it finally worked on my system.
The compatibility pack doesn't add new features to the old office versions. It just converts the new format to the old one so they can open it. As a result if the file contains any new features you can't open it or can only view it. For example the new text effects will be opened as images, which means no editing and lower quality when printing/zooming in. If the file was too new it may fail to open altogether. Even office 2007/2010 won't understand new features in office 2013/2016/2019
Don't know if you've upgraded those servers or not but you can try LibreOffice which has fairly good docx support. It can also convert the *.docx format to *.doc format. Other alternatives are Apache OpenOffice (might be outdated and less support) and WPS Office Suite.
You can also try online solutions such as Google Docs or MS Office 365
