Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

New to Open Office 4.1.3. Can MS Word templates be used in Open Office? I have a bunch I'd rather not have to recreate.

Thank!

Hi and welcome to the forum!

You will have to save them as AOO templates (.ott).
You may have to reformat the template since there is an import operation, MS Word format being an external format for AOO.

Please add [Solved] at the beginning of the title in your first post (top of the topic) with the edit button if your issue has been fixed.

How well a conversion works will depend largely on how the original template was created.

Specifically:

• Techniques used for placement/spacing. Word and Writer handle spacing and marginalia differently. If your template uses some means for meticulous placement, page headers/footers, frames, tables, columns, perhaps even tables within table cells, the settings for placement, margins and other spacing will most likely need adjustment. For atomated page layout changes (like a special first page) Writer will create a number of paragraph and page styles to handle the transition.
• Fields for document automation. Some fields translate easily. Others behave erratically. The "easy fields" introduced with Word 2013 will mostly be discarded, I think (I have some experience with conversion of those, but not very much...).
• Other formatting (e.g. numbered/hierarchical lists, automated paragraph transitions, special content in ToC/index) may also cause the creation of styles (sometimes a maze of interconnected paragraph, character, list and page styles).

After saving as ODT/OTT, check your template. Does it behave as expected?
Look at the styles. Do the style lists for paragraph or numbering styles contain countless "Convert..." or "WW8..." styles?
Do you still have access to Word? Sometimes the result is better when you save the file from Word (which also supports ODF formats in recent versions). Try both!

Sometimes it is a better idea to create the template from scratch instead of adjusting a converted Word template. It is sometimes a lot of work, but in the end it may save labor (and sanity). If those templates are downloaded from somewhere, see that site again. They may have specific Writer templates.

Good luck!

How do you save the templates as ODT/OTT? You don't mean just changing the extension do you?

Thanks.

See: [Tutorial] Creating a new default template.

Please add [Solved] at the beginning of the title in your first post (top of the topic) with the edit button if your issue has been fixed.

Fr. Frog wrote:How do you save the templates as ODT/OTT? You don't mean just changing the extension do you?

Thanks.

No. Open each template from Writer or Word, then "File - save as" and select an "open document" file type. (You probably want .ott, or perhaps .odt.)

Writer also has a batch convert option, useful if you have many files. I don't know how well it works with templates.