Complete Newbie

[Amelia Trisco]

Hi,
I’ve recently installed Notepad++ and needed it edit the source code of a .docx Word Document file to change the internal ‘strings’ of text whilst maintaining the original outward appearance of the document. In order to do this do I need to convert the .docx to a .zip and then locate the ‘document.xtml’ folder or can I just put in the actual .docx to change the source code?

Thanks in advance if you can help - this is kind of an obscure question.

[Claudia Frank]

@Amelia-Trisco

npp isn’t the right tool to do that.
LibreOffice or OpenOffice can handle .docx files very well.

Cheers
Claudia

[gstavi]

@Amelia-Trisco
After reading your question I googled a bit and found out that docx is indeed a zip file.
While I agree with @Claudia-Frank that Notepad++ is not the ideal tool for them, if for some reason you want to use it then you will need to:

• Unzip the docx file into some directory.
• Edit the XML files that were extracted.
• Rezip the files into docx and hope that everything is still consistent.

[Per Isakson]

@Amelia-Trisco

If you want to interactively edit some string values, I think you should consider to use an XML Editor, e.g. XML Notepad. See: Comparison of XML editors