Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

My previous computer, which had Microsoft Word, died. I reestablished all my files on a new computer with Carbonite. On my new computer I plan to use Openoffice for word processing, however all my current documents were saved with Word. I can open most documents after I first open Openoffice but if I just double click on a document (even after having edited it and saved it with Openoffice) it tries to sell me Word and will not directly open the document. Also, a couple of my documents they come up with only gibberish in Openoffice. How might I solve these issues.

Thank you



Solved

See this posting
viewtopic.php?f=15&t=96184&p=459668&hil ... ns#p459674
for how to tell your computer to use OpenOffice to open .odt (and other ODF) files.

The "gibberish" files may be PDF files and should be opened with a dedicated PDF reader, such as Adobe Reader. You may need to set their file associations top point to that reader (if it is installed - otherwise, download it and install).

If you are still using Carbonite, I recollect that it used cause crashes when it touched OpenOffice files being edited. You may need to change its settings so that doesn't happen.

Install https://libreoffice.org/ instead of OpenOffice. It is the legitimate successor of OpenOffice. It seems to be more stable on Windows 10 and more compatible to foreign file formats.
Both programs have a menu command File>Wizard>Document Converter... where you specify a folder and some document types. The tool will create copies of your Microsoft documents in Open Document Format (ODF). ODF files have name suffices odt for text, ods for spreadsheets, odp for presentations.

You can never expect perfect compatibility between complex file formats particularly when one of them does not follow decent technical statndards. [Tutorial] Differences between Writer and MS Word files