Problem opening .dot file correctly

[k5pgs]

I'm running Win XP Home, SP3, with OOo 3.1 I'm a newbie with OOo and on the forum.

When I open a .dot file I have received which shows the identifying colors of the parts of a quilt, the top half of the drawing and lettering comes out correctly, but all the lower half lettering is jammed up in the margin at the top. The file is attached.

[TheGurkha]

I'm not sure why anyone would send you a .dot file, which is a Word document template, rather than a 'normal' Word .doc document.

But I think the issue is that the document is basically a complicated table, and complicated tables don't translate well from Word to OOo. Until recently the .doc, .xls and other Microsoft binary formats were a locked proprietary secret and so the OOo developers had to basically reverse engineer them, so it isn't a surprise that these types of incompatibility arise every so often.

Can they send it to you in a different format, such as a PDF?

[k5pgs]

Thanks, Gurkha. I'm not sure if the program the person who sent me the file is using will output it as a .doc or not, but I'll ask her. I understand that OOo might not work with this one, in which case I may have to ask her to just send me a hard copy.
Hugs from Houston,
Charlie B.

[TheGurkha]

The program they're using should be able to - if it can create a .dot then it is probably Word, in which case the natural file format for that application is .doc. (Unless, of course, they are using some other software altogether which can output into Microsoft file formats, but that is less likely.) There's a good chance, sadly, that a .doc version will behave the same way in OOo though.