talkmagic.co.uk

I have been using Open Office for a fair while but never really needed to send anyone anything before but now I am they keep telling me they are unable to open the documents if they are using MS Office.

This is not true in all instances but in the majority, it only seems to happen with *.doc and *.odt but is okay with *.rtf. Although an rtf is okay I would rather be able to send as a doc or odt file because of formatting.

Anyone have any ideas? I found a vague answer on wiki answers but it seemed to be a bit of a "yes but, no but" answer.

Could be down to version compatibilities? I've used Open Office at home for a long time and always save as .doc to swap between home and work. It's fine with the older versions of MS Office but the newer version seems more fussy. It might be worth checking that you're running the latest vesion of Open Office.

Make sure you also save in a doc format that is compatible with the version used by the recipient. E.g. recipient uses older version of word but receives a newer doc file.

Also when saving it often asks if you want to discard OO native features in the file (which are often not even there) when saving as a doc.

I work with OO for a few years now and never had compatibility problems with other users. If the recipient only needs read and print rights I prefer pdf above anything else.

P.S.: I'm not a native English speaker, so I hope things are clear.

I'm going to say what everybody else is thinking: Openoffice is sh*t. It's not their fault, they have to reverse engineer and make a best guess effort on how to do certain formatting on what is a terrible file format

If the file doesn't need to be edited by the other person, you're best off exporting it as a PDF

I will heartily disagree with the idea that open office is bad. Its waaay better than the newer versions of MS Office (though I haven't tried the Windows 7 version yet, so can't speak for that one).
The problem is this: Your saving as the wrong file type. Simple as that. Your are saving it as an Open Office document.

When you save, go Save As then select the filetype for MS Office 2000/xp. Any version of MS Office can open that. Its what I do when I have to take work from my computer to the uni library. It will say on the list of file formats what they are compatible with, just always pick the 2000/XP one.

That will sort it

Thanks for your suggestions. I will try the above and if no joy export as a pdf.

Matthius88 wrote:I will heartily disagree with the idea that open office is bad. Its waaay better than the newer versions of MS Office (though I haven't tried the Windows 7 version yet, so can't speak for that one).

Oh, I think that as a piece of software, it's OK. It just has to deal with half a dozen versions of a file format (A new file format for every major release of MS Word which aren't backward compatible? What's all that about then?) and it has to guess how these formats work. And very often, it doesn't do a very good job of it. I shouldn't have to ask the other person which version of Office they're using before I send them a file!

another positive vote for open office...never had a problem...all you do is save the file as a word.doc (for XP or 98 i think the option is?) - or, as said - send it as a .pdf instead...a one click conversion is hardly over stretching the human mind is it...

im all for it...

kolm wrote:

Matthius88 wrote:I will heartily disagree with the idea that open office is bad. Its waaay better than the newer versions of MS Office (though I haven't tried the Windows 7 version yet, so can't speak for that one).

Oh, I think that as a piece of software, it's OK. It just has to deal with half a dozen versions of a file format (A new file format for every major release of MS Word which aren't backward compatible? What's all that about then?) and it has to guess how these formats work. And very often, it doesn't do a very good job of it. I shouldn't have to ask the other person which version of Office they're using before I send them a file!

As far as I've seen the Word XP filetype works for every MSW Word since. Our uni computers are on vista and windows 7 and it works on them.

I've used StarOffice for years, long before it became OpenOffice. The only problem I ever had with file formats was once when I was working online with someone who used MS Word. I was proofreading a complex research paper they'd written, including lots of graphs and tables.

StarOffice could open and display the documents perfectly well, but wasn't able to repackage the graphs and tables back into a .doc format to return it to them. In the end we got round it by just ignoring these, since my job was to correct the English anyway, not comment on the graphs.

Are you by any chance trying to send a complex document? I can't see that OpenOffice would have difficulty creating a .doc file that was only text. Make sure you're converting into a version they can read -- if in doubt, underestimate their capacity and go for something low-level.

Another possible problem could be fonts. Are you using a font the other person doesn't have? Maybe this would prevent MS Word from opening the document.

I think once I had trouble opening a document from the US because they use a different standard paper size. It was as simple as that. It's amazing sometimes what confuses a computer.