[Solved] Unable to open Word .DOCX files

[yohejohn]

Hello,

I have a new MacBook Air, OS Big Sur 11.1. I was able to finally have my computer 'allow' OpenOffice to open, but now I'm having a new problem:

When I try to open a Word document Open Office crashes and I get an error window saying:
OpenOffice quit unexpectedly. Click 'reopen' to open the application again. This report will be sent to Apple automatically.

When it restarts, I get a window saying "Open Office Document Recovery" with a 'status column' of the documents I tried to open. Also seems to have a 'bar' to show time elapse of recovering said documents, but it hasn't started. This has happened over and over. If I click on 'start recovery' it gives green checks next to the documents, but....they don't appear. If I click 'next', a new blank document just appears.

I CAN open Open Office documents no problem. But again, NOT Word .docx documents. How can I do so?

Thank you in advance.

John

[robleyd]

This is a known issue with Big Sur and AOO 4.1.8. See this blog post for more information.

[RusselB]

My recommendation is to stop working with OpenOffice and switch to http://www.libreoffice.org
LibreOffice has a higher level of compatibility with MS Office and is under more consistent updating than OpenOffice.

[Bidouille]

My recommendation is to download and use AOO 4.1.9(*) who solves this issue.
Maybe if a large public of end-users will testing, this will not happen.

(*) http://home.apache.org/~jim/AOO-builds/Dev/

[yohejohn]

Thanks all. I'm trying LibreOffice and loving how smooth it works with .docx files.

What is the difference between OpenOffice and LIbreOffice? Are they different people? Will the OpenOffice people get mad at us for talking about LibreOffice on here?

I will try uploading the new version of OpenOffice. I've used OpenOffice for years side by side with Word, but I'm fed up with Word and Microsoft and want something, a word processor, that works smoothly with my old .doc and .docx files, which LibreOffice is doing.

John

[RusselB]

LibreOffice is a fork of OpenOffice, which means that LibreOffice started with the same code as OpenOffice.
As to talking about LibreOffice here on the OpenOffice forum, that isn't a problem as, it is stated at the top of the page "User community support forum for Apache OpenOffice, LibreOffice and all the OpenOffice.org derivatives"

[Bidouille]

On the other hand, if only use is OOXML formats, the best solution is to buy MS-Office

[John_Ha]

See [Tutorial] Differences between Writer and MS Word files for a discussion.