Convert OpenOffice
to XWiki

Converting from OpenOffice ODT

Having office files in a proprietary format is a big risk, that you should avoid. Thanks to OpenOffice it’s not even hard to do. With the OpenOffice ODT format we’ve got an open format, that is based on other open formats. Every ODT file is a Zip file, that contains at least a content.xml (an XML file) with the — you might have guessed it already - the content. You can open the XML file in the program of your liking, update the content and re-open it in your office program without worrying to break the file. This enables you to interact with your office files through code. And even more important, you can be pretty sure there will always be software to open and edit those files. That’s a big plus, isn’t it?

The files end with .odt by default.

More about OpenOffice ODT files

Converting to XWiki markup

Let’s start with the good parts: XWiki is a free and open source software platform. The idea behing XWiki is to build a software that’s easily extensible. It comes with a Wiki (surprise!), a search, a blog, a file manager, a calendar, forums and tasks. A real jack of all trades. The text markup language looks like the MediaWiki syntax, but a few extra features. You can even add CSS to parts of your document (not sure if that’s a good idea though), or even complex things like a filterable table. Unfortunately the XWiki platform is written in Java. You should probably have some experience with Java to extend it’s functionality. That’s definitely not for me.

The files end with .txt by default. More about XWiki markup files