How To Open a WPS File in OpenOffice
Posted April 5th, 2009 by adminOpenOffice is generally quite versatile with the file types it supports - many old or proprietary formats can be opened and edited just fine. However, .wps files are an exception - even though the support for this format has been promised long ago (in 2005), the current distribution of OpenOffice still can’t recognize them. In this article I’ll discuss a bunch of methods to open a .wps file in OO.
Some modified OpenOffice versions come with the libwps library that allows you to you open WPS files. In particular, the Ubuntu OO and NeoOffice can do it. With libwps the task is completely seemless, as you can handle the MS Works file as any other document.
Another possibility is to use the command-line converter wps2odt. You can find this converter on SourceForge. Note that this software is only available in the source code form, so you’ll need to install CygWin if you want to run it on Windows. On a related note, there’s also the wps2html converter (also command-line) that can convert the WPS document to a HTML file. However, be warned that the HTML version may not preserve the original layout.
Speaking of converters, there are also a few WPS-to-DOC tools you can download, not to mention the popular online service Zamzar.com. OpenOffice can handle .doc files since forever, and you can save them as .odt later if you want. The best part about the converter(s) mentioned in the linked article is that they were created by Microsoft. While that might not sound like a good thing to an OpenOffice fan, do keep in mind that MS is the progenitor of the WPS format, so their converter is probably/hopefully the best available.