How do I read old star office 5.x spreadcheet documents today? (*.sdc)

I found a couple of old spreadsheet documents that I created a couple of years ago that I would like to read again.

I think I used the old Star Office 5.2 to create those Spreadsheets.

They all have names like *.sdc

I have tried to use Open Office to open them, but he can't recognise what it is.

Does anybody have any idea how I can open those documents?

Thanks Johan

Solution 1:

try OpenOffice.org v1.15, you can still download it at FileHippo.com, the code base should be similar if not identical:

Sun offered StarOffice 5.2 as a free download for personal use, and soon went through an exercise similar to Netscape's relicensing of Mozilla, by releasing most of the StarOffice source code under a free/open source license. The resultant free/open source software codebase is developed as OpenOffice.org

Solution 2:

I found a nice package in Ubuntu 10.04 that is called "openoffice.org-filter-binfilter".

The description tells us that I can handle the old StarOffice format.

This package contains the "binfilters", legacy filters for
- the old StarOffice 5.2 formats 

And after I installed it I could actually read the old file in OpenOffice.

Solution 3:

If you choose to install the so-called outdated filters you can mostly read the files... but if there is some formula in which a text-field is included (which was allowed in 5.x), you will get errors in all the further results.

For example if you have typed a dash in a column ('-') noting that you don't have a value (like 0 or 99), you have this errors in OpenOffice. If you can open it in StarOffice, you will not have the errors (since they are no errors) until you save it and re-open the file. Also, included linked files will get errors after re-opening them.

Actually you can open the files in LibreOffice with the same limitations.