All about SDW files

SDW stands for StarWriter Document and is the text document format used by StarOffice up to version 5. The story began back in 1984 when Marco Börries, then aged 16, programmed StarWriter 1.0 for the Zilog Z80 and founded the company Star Division in Lüneburg just one year later. Over the years, StarWriter developed into a complete office suite (StarOffice) for MS-DOS, OS/2 and Windows. StarOffice was later acquired by Sun, the source code was released in 2000, and the basis for OpenOffice was created.

SDW files use the Microsoft Compound File Format (OLE2), similar to .DOC files. The successor to SDW is SXW, which has been used by StarOffice 6 since 2002.

The easiest way to use SDW files with current software is to convert them to SXW or DOCX. Current versions of LibreOffice can no longer open .SDW files directly.

Last updated on 11. March 2026 by Sören with the experience of more than 127,898,492 converted files since 2013.