Convert SXW Online Free

About SXW

Convert SXW OpenOffice.org documents to and from the formats other software reads, in your browser. Everything runs on your own device, so the document is never uploaded and it arrives on the other side intact.

What an SXW file holds

Someone hands you a file ending .sxw and no application wants to touch it. It came from OpenOffice.org 1.x, the open-source office suite that showed up in the early 2000s, and it is a word-processing document: the ancestor of the OpenDocument Text (ODT) files you see now. Underneath it is XML zipped into one file, so the text is still in there as readable text rather than sealed in a binary blob.

Inside, SXW looks much like ODT, because ODT grew out of it. Unzip one and you get a set of XML files: the text of the document in one, the styling in another, the metadata in a third, with any images or multimedia sitting alongside them. That arrangement came from the OpenOffice.org XML format, and it is the arrangement OpenDocument went on to formalise. The idea that a document should be inspectable rather than opaque starts here.

Strengths and limits

Unzip an SXW and you can read it. That is the practical value of an open, XML-based format, and it is why these files are still recoverable twenty years on: the formatting is all described in there, and getting at it needs a zip tool and patience rather than the original software. That transparency is what OpenDocument carried forward, and anyone who has tried to rescue a document from a dead proprietary format knows which situation they would rather be in.

Open an SXW in a current office suite and it will likely be treated as something old that needs converting before the modern features will work on it. ODT replaced it and did the job better. In practice almost nobody creates SXW files now, so the ones you meet are from archives: historical OpenOffice.org documents, and files nobody has had reason to touch in fifteen years.

SXW Development History

The OpenOffice.org project released SXW in 2002. At that point most word-processing formats were proprietary, which meant your documents were only as accessible as the company that owned the format chose to make them. SXW was the argument for the other approach: an open, interoperable format that anyone could implement. That shift toward open standards for creating and sharing documents is the thing it is remembered for.

OpenDocument was built on what SXW established, which is the real mark it left. It spread through OpenOffice.org and the applications that could read it, and text editors and converters grew up around it. Then ODT arrived and SXW was quietly retired. What remains is archives: documents written in the years it was the default, still sitting on drives and still needing to open.

Using SXW Effectively

There is an office somewhere still running OpenOffice.org 1.x because the machine works and nobody has budget to change it. That is who SXW is for, along with anyone keeping files readable for a system that never learned ODT. It also suits passing documents around without proprietary software in the chain, which usually means a team on older office applications editing and emailing files between themselves.

Formatting is what you stand to lose. Modern applications support SXW incompletely, so a conversion can quietly drop details the original had. Use tools that preserve the XML structure rather than whatever is quickest. Then open the result and check it, because a converted file that opens is not the same as a converted file that is intact.

Working with SXW files

You will meet SXW files in archives built with OpenOffice.org 1.x, before the switch to OpenDocument.

To bring the document up to date, convert it to ODT, its direct successor, or to DOCX if it needs to open in Microsoft Word. LibreOffice and OpenOffice both read SXW and will save to either.