Exporting Emacs Org documents to Microsoft Word

In order to export org-mode documents to Microsoft Word I took the following steps:

  1. Install Cygwin, and specifically the unzip executable. (I read Info-Zip seems to work, but haven't tried it myself.)

  2. Set the preferred output format to docx :

    (require 'ox-odt)
(setq org-odt-preferred-output-format "docx")

;; Add cygwin to the execpath on windows to be able to export to ODF
(when (eq system-type 'windows-nt)
  (add-to-list 'exec-path "C:\\cygwin64\\bin"))

  3. Org-mode requires soffice executable for document conversion, which is part of LibreOffice. I installed the portable version of LibreOffice. Be sure to add the App\libreoffice\program directory to your PATH

  4. Finally, restart Emacs.