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Using the doc format with Openoffice Writer
Eires brought up a good comment on my post on the release of OpenOffice 3. Sending documents to people with Microsoft Office causes problems because they cannot open them. Well they can with the Sun ODF plugin, but it isn't the best of manners to expect people to install software to read your files.
The good news is that not only can OpenOffice (2 and later) save in Office 2003 formats but can be set to do so by default. I know that slightly defeats the whole open source ethos, but it's hard to preach about that when deadlines are missed due to incompatible file formats.
How to do it? I hear you cry. Here it is....
- Left-click on the Tools menu and then Options.
- Click on the small plus symbol next to Load/Save and then click on General.
- Click on the down arrow in the drop down menu and then select Microsoft Word 97/2000/XP.
- There is a warning that some information may be lost, I've never noticed anything missing.
While you're in this option page, I would recommend setting the Autorecover time to a smaller time. I haven't done it yet, but I normally have it set to something between 3 and 5 minutes.
Doing this will require some real soul searching.
In our office we have about half the XP Machines with older versions of Word and a bunch with Openoffice. But whenever I received an attachment that was office 2003 formatted I seemed to be sitting at one of the machines without the compatible software to open this.
Now, if we make this change, I'm going to be contributing to the problem.
(And yes, we probably should.)
posted-by Jon Boyd | December 7, 2008 6:14 PM
Finally, I was waiting for something like this forever.
I wasn't aware that you can do this by default now.
Thanks a lot for that great tip!
Eddie
posted-by Eddie Corbano | December 18, 2008 6:18 PM
I like Sun's office competitor, especially the print to pdf feature that preserves hyperlinks! I didn't know you could set the default to save to .doc. That's a great tip!
posted-by Bill Davis | December 25, 2008 8:04 AM
I've noticed that if you open a .doc file (created with Oo Writer) in MS Word, some parts are messed up. Looks fine with Writer and no information seems to be gone in either program. I'm just saying that it doesn't work perfectly. And I'm using the latest Openoffice 3.0.0.
posted-by Ville Virtanen | January 7, 2009 11:51 AM
I have came to hate Windows Word and use openoffice all the time .. you can convert your docs to pdf and it will do alot of things word can't and it is easier to copy and paste from to. and it is free though I did buy windows office cause some of the other programs I use in it..
posted-by Candy W | February 3, 2009 12:21 PM