converting star office files to winword

my girlfriend has a long story she had written with star office. it was saved as a .SDW file.
is there a way to convert this to a .DOC file so winword can open it? I do not have star office anymore, and unfortunately im on 56 k now, so larger dl's arent really an option. i was hopin maybe theres smaller tool 20mb. or less i could try.

ty.

 

If the document doesn't contain a lot of formatting or embedded objects, you could try changing the extension .sdw to .doc, but I don't like your chances of success.

For your information, the best format to save in for compatibility is rtf (Rich Text Format) which almost every word processor supports.

If you know how to use Macro's, then try THIS, however, I think it's far easier to find someone with StarOffice who can easily convert it for you.

 

Very unlikely that the person who posted this question so long ago hasn't done something about their situation but just for the record...

Although it isn't foolproof and won't always work, Microsoft Word has a feature for attempting to recover text from any file. This can also be extremely useful when a file gets corrupted.

Open Word and then from the File menu, choose Open.
In the "Files of type" near the bottom of the dialog box that opens, scroll down until you find "Recover text from any file" and select that.
Now navigate to where the file is that you want to open and select it.
Next click on Open and you will be able to see what Word found.

It's quite possible that it will find a lot of gobbedly gook but somewhere in amongst the however many pages it came up with (and 100 is quite possible!) you might find the text you're looking for. Doubtful that they'll be any formatting but at least you get your text back.

The gobbedly gook is usually made up of information about the program that was used to make the file, the name of the owner of the program, etc., etc. Basically just information about the file that you probably don't want. Also, a lot of pages may have so little on them that you wonder why they're there. It can be very useful to use "2 pages" to see which pages can be scrubbed immediately.

Sometimes the text you want is there but every character is followed by a little box and reading your text is a bit tricky. If you know someone who knows how to make and use macros, you can get them to run a macro over your recovered text to remove every second character quickly and easily and leave just the text behind.

Microsoft Publisher also has this feature and I'm not sure if PowerPoint does as well.