How To Open a WPS File in OpenOffice
OpenOffice is normally 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 describe a bunch of methods to handle files with the .wps extension in OpenOffice.
Some custom OpenOffice variants come with the libwps library that lets you open WPS files. In particular, the Ubuntu version and NeoOffice include this library. With libwps the task is completely seemless, as you can handle the .wps file as any other document.
Another possibility is to use the command-line converter wps2odt. You can find this converter on SourceForge. Note that the program is distributed as source, 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 document. However, keep in mind that the HTML version may not preserve the original layout.
Speaking of converters, there are also several WPS to DOC converters you can download, not to mention the popular online service Zamzar.com. OpenOffice can open .doc files since forever, and you can save them in the native OO format later if you wish. 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.
