Setting OO as default for opening email attachments - How?

[rodrigt]

Hi,
I'm a 'Windows renegade' and first time OO user; I'm using OO 2.2 in Puppy Linux, running in RAM - booting from a LiveCD. (I'm doing this to get away from the security nightmare of using Windows, particularly when opening email attachments.)

Q- Is there a way to set up OO as the 'default' for opening DOC, XLS and PPT email attachments?

On the Firefox (2.2) browser I've succeeded at getting several other file extensions to open automatically upon clicking 'download', but with DOC/XLS/PPT I need to start OO and then load the file manually. In OO under Tools/Options/Internet I have 'Mozilla Plug in' enabled, but didn't make any difference.

Any other suggestions? I sure would appreciate some guidance - Thanks.

[Hagar Delest]

To be configured in the e-mail client I think. Which is?

[esperantisto]

When I opened an attachment for the first time, Mozilla Thunderbird asked me to choose the default application, and I chose OOo, and Thunderbird just remembered it.

[rodrigt]

Hagar de l'Est wrote:
> To be configured in the e-mail client I think. Which is?
-- What I do is use my browser for logging onto various email services, such as hotmail.com, yahoo.com and Gmail. (Coming from MS junk and security nightmares since Windows 3.1 I never trusted applications such as Outlook or Outlook express for handling email - and never explored others such as Eudora, etc.)

esperantisto wrote:
> When I opened an attachment for the first time, Mozilla Thunderbird asked me to choose the default application, and I chose OOo, and Thunderbird just remembered it.
-- Hmm... Perhaps my problem is with the Firefox 2.2 (another Mozilla product) that is included in my (Transitions) distro of Puppy Linux. On this Firefox I've gone to Edit/Preferences/Content and under File Types/Manage I've set the default for DOC files as 'Open with default wordprocessor', etc.

Perhaps I need to post on the Puppy or Firefox forums about how to set OO as the 'default', so that my Firefox can remember it. (PS- I'm delaying upgrading to Firefox 3 because it doesn't yet seem stable under Puppy Linux V4.0 - Dingo.) - Yes, all of this in order to break away from the MS Windows security nightmare.

I sure would appreciate any further guidance - Thanks.

[Hagar Delest]

You should really try Thunderbird, it's far more comfortable than using the web browser.
In Firefox, perhaps you should change the 'Default word processor' to the direct command line to OOo.

[sybille]

Can you open ODT and ODS files in Firefox? If so, that means the browser plugin is installed correctly.

The OOo browser plugin does not open MS Office files by default. It is possible to tell it to do so by editing a file in you Firefox profile. Here are instructions: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=94384

This works for me in GNOME. You might need to remove the "Open with default wordprocessor" preferences you've set in Firefox, also, I don't know.

[rodrigt]

You should really try Thunderbird, it's far more comfortable than using the web browser.
In Firefox, perhaps you should change the 'Default word processor' to the direct command line to OOo.

Hagar, Thanks. This now works great for DOC--->swrite and XLS--->scalc (set to Always...), now I simply click on these types of email attachments and they open automatically! Unfortunately the same process (PPT--->simpress) wouldn't work for PowerPoint, i.e. upon closing simpress the next time I attempted to read a PPT email attachment I had to find simpress again. Any suggestions? (PS- The successful changes for DOC and XLS continued to function after rebooting the PC.)

Can you open ODT and ODS files in Firefox? If so, that means the browser plugin is installed correctly.
The OOo browser plugin does not open MS Office files by default. It is possible to tell it to do so by editing a file in you Firefox profile. Here are instructions: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=94384

Sybille, Thanks. Like with PPT, setting ODT--->swrite did not work. Does that mean that the browser plugin is NOT installed correctly? Any suggestions? (PS- The link you provided is very clearly written, I'll try that next.)

[Hagar Delest]

Instead of selecting simpress, try soffice, OOo will open the right module.

[sybille]

Just to be clear, what I wrote only pertains to opening office-type documents in Firefox, not in Thunderbird, and it concerns using the OOo browser plugin rather than the external applications.

If you do want to use the plugin, you could check what plugins Firefox knows. You can do this by typing "about:plugins" into the Firefox address bar (no quotes needed). This should open up a report in Firefox that lists all your browser plugins. You should see an entry like this:

Code: Select all   Expand viewCollapse view

OpenOffice.org Plug-in
File name: libnpsoplugin.so
OpenOffice.org Plug-in handles all its documents

It will be followed by a listing of all the file types the plugin recognizes.

If that checks out OK, then I think what you need to do is to reset the file associations you set in Firefox, the ones that look for the external OOo application (swriter) rather than using the plugin. There are several ways to do this, so I'll refer you to a Mozillazine article that has a good explanation for the different versions of Firefox: http://kb.mozillazine.org/File_types_an ... ad_actions

But all of that is for using the plugin, which is different than using the external application. If you're fine with using the external application, and if Hagar's suggestion doesn't work, then it still might be a good idea to try resetting the file associations as described above. And it might be a good idea to disable the plugin in the OOo Options, too.