Unable to read a document. A strange docx extension

[likedreamersdo]

Hello! My colleague sent me his aticle but I can't open it. Could someone help me? I expect it to be a Word document because he always sends me documents created in Microsoft Word. And what is the file he sent me now… I can't get it. He said he sent me a document. From the extension (I see docx) I understand it should be a Word document. I renamed it to doc to open it in Word. I guess he renamed the file to avoid problems with the mail client, or spam filters or something. They created so many barriers for making communications the way we did it before... But I can't open it. Maybe I do something wrong? I can't contact him right now but I need this file today. Could somebody please help me?

[webman]

It's a Microsoft Office Open XML document created with Word 2007.

[alexkeller]

It's a document created in Microsoft Word 2007 and saved in a new Open XML format. This is a XML file put into an ZIP container. To be able to read it in Microsoft Office 2003 you need to set up the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats that you can download from here.

[likedreamersdo]

Thanks a lot, guys! That helped! The only thing, it shows me that file is read-only in the title bar.

[alexkeller]

I am glad that it helped you. For the future, you can refer to this site if you got a file with the extension that you don't know how to open. For example to find the description for the docx extension just type http://filext.com/file-extension/DOCX
You can trick Word and make it remove the read-only flag from the titlebar by renaming (now it's exactly the case when it needed) the docx extension to doc. Because Microsoft Word opens documents based on its format and not extension you will be able to read the docx file and not see the read-only phrase in the document window header.