Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

A delighted user of OpenOffice 3.1, I have downloaded but not yet installed 3.2. I know that I must uninstall 3.1, but I'm concerned about losing any documents that I generated in 3.1. I don't always save all documents in the same location or folder. I'm not concerned about losing settings.

Also I downloaded the extension for PDF editing, and may or may not have installed the extension correctly, but I found it quite difficult to edit a supposedly unlocked PDF.

Also, I hope like everyone else, that OpenOffice comes up with an equivalent to Outlook.

Thanks in advance for any help,

CalWriter

Hi and welcome to the forum!

For an equivalent of Outlook, see What stops me from going OO.org ? PIM !.

PDF edition is anyway a difficult task because a PDF is a digital print, not intended to be edited.

Upgrading won't have any impact on your documents. It can have with their rendering: for example there is a bug in 3.2 that hides the embedded spreadsheets in .doc files. But if you use native ODF, no problem at all.

Thanks to add '[Solved]' at beginning of your first post title (edit button) if your issue has been fixed.

Its not necessary to uninstall V3.1 some folks do I don't. No documents will be lost uninstalling and then re-installing does not affect your documents. Before installing V3.2 Right Click on the Quickstarter in the system tray and select exit. Press Crtl-Alt-Del to launch task manager. On the Processes tab look for soffice.bin or .exe and terminate them all. If you are unsure of the extension you installed use Tools--->Extension manager to remove it. PDF files can edited with the http://extensions.services.openoffice.o ... /pdfimport. Editing is very limited and is not intended for completely rewriting a PDF file.

So uninstalling the program does not uninstall 0DF docs?

All I was intending to do with the PDF edit was change the phone number on my resume. Couldn't do it.

Thanks

Forgive me for replying to my own message. If I use an uninstaller, like Revo, is it necessary to go manually into processes as suggested?

Should I have been able to edit my phone number on my resume with that pdf extension?

Thanks

Surely, if it is your resume, you have the source? Change the number there and recreate the pdf.

CalWriter wrote:So uninstalling the program does not uninstall 0DF docs?

No! That's also the power of an ISO-certified format: even if OOo development is stopped, other office suites can implement it (like some already does, especially under GNU/Linux). You're not locked with a single editor. Remove OOo, there are not that many applications that can work with .doc and .xls for example.

CalWriter wrote:Forgive me for replying to my own message. If I use an uninstaller, like Revo, is it necessary to go manually into processes as suggested?
Thanks

Removing them manually just insures that they are not running when you try to install V3.2. Using Revo should accomplish the same purpose. Reboot after you use Revo.

Thanks all, for all of the good advice.

Unfortunately I don't have the source for my resume, which was done by a graphic artist friend of mine. All I have are physically printed copies of my resume with the graphics work he had done on them, which I then scan into my computer as PDF. If I could add to or edit the resumes I have it would be cool

CalWriter

CalWriter wrote:All I was intending to do with the PDF edit was change the phone number on my resume. Couldn't do it.

You should really stick to one question per thread or things can become confusing with the different replies being mingled into one thread.

PDF was never intended to be a malleable file format, in the way that a word processor document is. Word processor files are intended to hold dynamic data, and to be changed and saved and opened and changed etc. PDF was designed to be an 'electronic print out'. it is better to always modify the original document and create a new PDF.

However, there is a Sun PDF extension. Its purpose is to make very small edits such as correcting typos, not full-blown editing of PDFs. It should have been capable of doing what you describe.

Can you scan them as some format that can be OCR'd (if you have any OCR software with your scanner) to get the text out of the resume, and then scan it as an image and use GIMP or similar to clip the artwork out of it.

Then edit a new OOo file and combine the text content and the artwork.

Thanks, TheGurkha

I was thinking about trying to OCR it.

Didn't mean to overload the thread..It's just thzt I'e been pondering these issues for sometime, and thought I could make a tasty stew of these concerns rather than bring them up singly, like tapas.
CalWriter

CalWriter wrote:All I have are physically printed copies of my resume with the graphics work he had done on them, which I then scan into my computer as PDF.

That's a different story! Your scanner has changed the paper to a picture, then it has embedded it in a PDF file. But it's not a true PDF file coming from an office suite, it's just a jpg file inserted in a PDF container. Hence no PDF edition possible: the text is made of pixels, whereas a true PDF contains the information like the plain text, its formatting and location in the page, ...

The only thing you can do is scan the graphics, try to recreate them depending on the kind of graphics (scalable, ...) and retype the text.

Thomasjk mentioned that one need not uninstall 3.1 to install 3.2. Is that correct?

But just to make certain one more time (given the international flavor of this forum...which I like...but with the occasional language misunderstandings) all my 3.1 documents will remain IF I decide to uninstall 3.1? Correct?

Thanks,

From Los Angeles
City of Illusion

CalWriter

CalWriter wrote:But just to make certain one more time (given the international flavor of this forum...which I like...but with the occasional language misunderstandings) all my 3.1 documents will remain IF I decide to uninstall 3.1? Correct?

Provided your existing documents are in "sensible" directories, i.e. not in the directories that OpenOffice is going to modify. It is _always_ good pracice to backup important work before doing any major alteration to a computer or its software. If you have an external drive, just copy all your work to it, just in case.

Thank you for your reply.

With so many complex things happening in my life right now I'm not sure that I have created sensible directories or folders into which I have consistently saved OpenOffice documents. I did open up the program OpenOffice on my computer and do not see any folder containing documents, so I must have saved what I generated on the desktop or in my ThinkPad documents folder.

Forgive my ignorance, but should I be looking for ODP or ODF documents?

CalWriter

CalWriter wrote:But just to make certain one more time (given the international flavor of this forum...which I like...but with the occasional language misunderstandings) all my 3.1 documents will remain IF I decide to uninstall 3.1? Correct?

As long as you just use the built-in uninstaller to uninstall OOo, you shouldn't have any problem. The built-in uninstaller should delete only files which were part of the original installation--no files which were added by the user after the original installation should be deleted. If you use an uninstaller program like RevoUninstaller, you have to be more careful. If you have saved any documents in the OOo program files folder, RevoUninstaller will offer to delete them. Note, however, that users should never save documents in the program files folder. Users of Vista normally won't have write permission for the program files folder, and won't be able to save documents there unless OOo is run "as administrator" or possibly if UAC has been disabled.

The default path for saving ins OOo is C:\Users\username\Documents for Vista and Windows 7. This is the "MY Documents" folder in XP. The OOo file extensions are:
.odt for text files ( word processing)
.ods for spreadsheets
.odb for databases
.odg for Drawing files.
.odp for Impress ( presentation files)
.odf for Formula files.

The first two are the ones most common for users.

I can't seem to find the built-in uninstaller.

I notice that most of my OpenOffice documents are in Thinkpad/documents folder.

Thanks,

CalWriter

Click--->Start--->Control Panel--->Programs. Click Uninstall a Program. Find the OOo entry and right click and select Uninstall.

All is well.
3.2 is now installed, it even recognizes recent documents generated in 3.1.

Nevertheless before uninstalling I made a copy of my ThinkPad/documents folder just in case.

Where do I find the tab to show that this question thread has been solved?

Thanks to all.

CalWriter

CalWriter wrote:Where do I find the tab to show that this question thread has been solved?

You've to do that manually (edit button). I've done that for you.

Merci bien.

CalWriter