SXW is the text document format of OpenOffice.org 1.x and StarOffice 6 and 7, the office suites Sun Microsystems distributed between 2002 and 2005. If you find .sxw files today, they usually come from an old backup, a school or office archive, or a Linux machine from that era. The format is obsolete, but the files are easy to rescue.
History
Before 2002, StarOffice used binary formats such as .sdw. With OpenOffice.org 1.0 in 2002, Sun switched to an XML-based format, developed openly by the community. Writer documents got the extension .sxw, templates .stw, and the sibling applications used .sxc (spreadsheets), .sxi (presentations) and .sxd (drawings).
The design was so successful that Sun submitted it to OASIS as the basis of a vendor-neutral standard. The result was OpenDocument, approved in 2005 and later published as ISO/IEC 26300. OpenOffice.org 2.0 (October 2005) switched to ODT as its default. SXW and ODT are close relatives, but not the same format: element names and namespaces differ, so a program that reads only ODT will not open SXW.
What is inside
An SXW is a ZIP archive, as the Apache OpenOffice XML FAQ explains. It contains content.xml with the text, styles.xml, meta.xml with author and dates, settings.xml, images in Pictures/ and the manifest META-INF/manifest.xml. The MIME type is application/vnd.sun.xml.writer. Because everything is XML, the text of even a damaged SXW can usually be recovered by unzipping it and opening content.xml.
How to open SXW files
- Windows, macOS, Linux: LibreOffice Writer and Apache OpenOffice still open SXW. LibreOffice can no longer save in it (export to OpenOffice.org 1.x formats was removed around version 4.3), so save the opened file as ODT or DOCX.
- Microsoft Word, Google Docs, Pages: do not open SXW. Convert the file first.
- Phone: no common mobile app reads SXW. Convert it to PDF or DOCX.
Common problems
“Word cannot open this file” or Windows does not know the .sxw extension
Word has never supported OpenOffice.org 1.x files. Install LibreOffice, or convert the file here to DOCX without installing anything.
A folder of old SXW files needs to be archived
For editing, ODT is the closest and most faithful target. For long-term reading, PDF is safer. Upload up to 10 files at once and download the results as one ZIP.
Converting SXW
Our converter opens SXW on our own servers and saves it as ODT, DOCX, DOC, RTF, PDF, HTML or plain text, and also as EPUB. Text, styles, tables, images, headers and footers carry over well. Password-protected SXW files cannot be converted without the password. For the PDF route see ODT to PDF, which works the same way for SXW.
SXW in brief
| Developer | Sun Microsystems, OpenOffice.org community |
|---|---|
| In use | 2002 (OpenOffice.org 1.0, StarOffice 6) to 2005 |
| Successor | OpenDocument Text (ODT), ISO/IEC 26300 |
| Type | word-processing document, ZIP package with XML |
| Compression | Deflate (ZIP) |
| MIME type | application/vnd.sun.xml.writer |
| Status | obsolete; read by LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice |
Registry entry: PRONOM fmt/128 (The National Archives, UK).