[Solved] Word format opens in quark express

[pardee40]

Just installed OOo, when I try to open a word format document,( don't have Word) it opens in Quark Express. How do I get this to open in OOo?

[foxcole]

Just installed OOo, when I try to open a word format document,( don't have Word) it opens in Quark Express. How do I get this to open in OOo?

Please read the Survival Guide to the forum (see the link in my sig line below), specifically about providing your operating system version.

If you are running Windows, you need to change the file association. Usually this is done with a right-click on a Word file. Choose Open With, select Choose program, be sure to tick the checkbox "Always use the selected program to open this kind of file", and navigate to the Writer application.

If you're not running Windows, I've just misspent my time on something I can't help with.

[pardee40]

Thanks, Foxcole!! Sorry about the operating system, Windows XP Home, Version 5.1.26. I tried right clicking, I can do a " save target as" then "save as type" MS Word Document or all file types. We have Word on our computer, which is why it wants to open a Word doc., we just never converted to the full product when the trial version expired. I don't know where to go from here. Any help would be appreciated.

[foxcole]

Thanks, Foxcole!! Sorry about the operating system, Windows XP Home, Version 5.1.26. I tried right clicking, I can do a " save target as" then "save as type" MS Word Document or all file types.

What we're trying to do here is not to save the file, but to change the file association. The file association is how the Windows operating system knows which program to use for opening files with a particular file extension (in this case, the .doc file extension). Currently, Quark is by default associated with Word files on your computer.

So you don't want to choose "save file as" in the right-click menu, you want "open with" along with the rest of the steps I detailed above. Remember to right-click on the unopened file; don't open it first.

Your right-click menu might or might not have two different options that start with "open with" but the one you want is the fly-out menu, the one that opens a second menu when you hover the mouse pointer over it. It's probably not in the first grouping of options in the menu, but farther down.

Below is a screenshot of my right-click menu for a .doc file, with the Open With fly-out menu. You'll notice several items in these menus that you probably don't have in yours. These are all programs that I have installed and that can take some kind of action on a .doc file. For example, Acrobat can convert the file, the NOD32 antivirus can scan it for viruses. (In the fly-out menu, the swriter.exe listing is for the copy of OOo 2.3.1 I have installed locally on the computer. The selected program, OpenOffice.org Writer Portable, is the version I have on my USB flash drive, which I can take with me and run on other computers without having to install it.)

If for some reason you don't see an "Open with" option like that, please let me know. There is another way to get to the file association function. The right-click method is just the easiest route.