At 15:35 19/07/2016 +0100, Matt Mills wrote:
I have been using OpenOffice Writer for a number of years and I have recently has problems with the program. A main concern is whenever i save a document in Word 97/2000/XP format, the program tells me that the document has been saved in the format I requested, but when I go to open the documents, they are displayed as an unknown file type with the unknown file icon (the white box with three squares). Every time I save a document now, even previous documents that have been saved as Word 97/00/XP documents, they are converted to unknown file types every time I go back into OpenOffice.
You may well imagine that the icon you see outside OpenOffice - provided by your operating system - shows the format in which any document file has been saved. But this is not true. Instead, the choice of icon will be based on the application that your operating system would use to open the file by default if you double-click it. In most cases this depends only on the extension to the file name, not on any property of the document file itself.
So what is likely is that your saved files are indeed in your chosen format but that they lack the .doc extension to indicate this to your operating system. You can test this by starting OpenOffice first and then using File | Open ... (or the Open... button in the start screen) to browse to and open the files - which you should find works normally, as this does not rely on your operating system's default settings.
OpenOffice has a strange option in the Save As... dialogue box. Near the bottom, you will see an "Automatic file name extension" tick box. Has this become unticked? If it has, you will be saving documents in the correct format, but the file names will not be getting the proper extension. So a document will be called just "name" rather than "name.doc". If you replace the tick, it will stick for further saves.
You can deal with existing rogue files either by opening them as above and then saving them with the appropriate extension (once you have replaced the tick) or else by using your operating system's facilities to rename the files, adding the extension manually.
I also had difficulty with the formatting of a Word document that I opened in OpenOffice. When I opened the file, the formatting had been thrown around and text boxes were moved and had a strange red arrow in the right-had corner. I have never known of this problem before - could it be due to a virus?
No. First, there will always be differences when you open documents in foreign formats or prepared by other application software. Indeed, there will be differences even without these changes if you have a different operating system, version of the application software, default printer, paper size, installed fonts, and so on. For best results, once you have formatted a document as you wish, save it in OpenOffice's native Open Document Format formats - .odt etc. - for later further use.
The red arrow just indicates that there is more text in the table cell than can be displayed at the current font, size, or other settings, I think. Enlarge the table cell or change the character formatting to see the rest of the contents.
I trust this helps. Brian Barker --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@openoffice.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@openoffice.apache.org
