All the notes are gone (.rtf)

nyteck · Post by **nyteck** » Tue Jan 25, 2011 4:42 pm

I have spent hours making track changes and "notes" (comments) to on open office 3.1 document . My client only has word. I was told to save in .rtf for the changes to show up in word. I did so.. now I opened my document in Open office and ALL my notes are GONE. The track changes are jumbled and many are gone. If I go to "show notes" I can't click on it, it's light gray. There seems to be nothing I can do. Also, for safety I had saved the document on a pen drive.. I went to retrieve it and mysteriously it is saved as NOTEPAD! If I open it in notepad, it's empty. If I force this notepad file to open in open office, I get a popup error "file format error found at 75870 row, col". I can also see an odd "shadow" .rtf file has been created, but I can't open it. The closest I can get to the original is opening the .rtf file in open office, but all notes in margin are gone and most of the track changes run into each other (no strikethrough, no changes in color for corrections, etc.). Oddly, only in the article's footnotes, my track changes appear semi-normal, though the notes are gone there too (I have no idea why). Can someone please help me? I am desperate

Title Edited. A descriptive title for posts helps others who are searching for solutions and increases the chances of a reply (Hagar, Moderator).

edit this topic's initial post · Post by **Villeroy** » Tue Jan 25, 2011 5:30 pm

How about a computer course?

Post by **RoryOF** » Tue Jan 25, 2011 6:41 pm

OpenOffice support for rtf format is poor. We always recommend working and saving in OOo's native format (.odt in this case) and saving to .doc only when necessary. Try opening your .rtf file in Wordpad, by opening Wordpad and then pointing it to the file.

Post by **Hagar Delest** » Tue Jan 25, 2011 6:53 pm

Check your backup folder too, perhaps you'll have an odt version of the file (see [Tutorial] The OOo user profile).

And as said by RoryOF, make copies in external formats only, keep the original in native ODF (.odt).

Post by **Cambirder** » Tue Jan 25, 2011 8:31 pm

I'm afraid whoever told you to save in that format gave you terrible advice. Never ever save in RTF it will just be totally screwed up. If you never saved the file in otf or doc format before saving as an rtf file there is no way back, if you did you should still have the original which you can forward in .doc format.

nyteck · Post by **nyteck** » Wed Jan 26, 2011 3:09 am

Thanks everyone who answered (except for Villeroy, who apparently needs to grow up)... I have resigned myself to starting the revision all over again... I had never saved in .rtf while using open office before, and I can say I never will again! I apparently got horrible advice from my client who assured me .rtf open office files would show up perfectly in word....

SGB · Post by **SGB** » Sat Apr 23, 2016 11:00 pm

Same thing just happened to me. Hours of work lost on two files and a seriously botched editing process with a writer as a result. I have one overriding complaint: if OO can't/won't save inserted comments when you choose (in order to minimize cross-app/cross-platform incompatibilities) to create and save in RTF format, then why the $#%%# does it go through the &*$%%^$^ing motions? Why does it give you the false sense of security that it can? Why not just disable that functionality for RTF?

Bill · Post by **Bill** » Sun Apr 24, 2016 4:35 am

A warning is displayed when saving in RTF format that formatting or content could be lost. You should never assume that such warnings don't apply to you.

Post by **John_Ha** » Sun Apr 24, 2016 12:40 pm

Never use .rtf, or any other file format except .odt, for saving a file unless you are absolutely forced to, and then save your work in .odt and only create a copy in .rtf.

Always use .odt as .odt supports all of Writer's features.

See for example [Solved] RTF format changes when uploading to Turnitin.com.

: Warning that formatting may be lost when saving as a .rtf; Clipboard01.png (10.42 KiB) Viewed 6415 times

If you have switched off these warning messages, you can switch them back on by Tools > Options > Load/Save > General ...

Post by **John_Ha** » Sun Apr 24, 2016 7:17 pm

You may be lucky and be able to recover the text as Writer appears to treat .rtf files the same as .odt files when editing them.

See Using Recuva to un-delete Writer temporary files for help recovering the temporary files which Writer wrote while you were editing the .rtf file, and then deleted when Writer was closed.

edit this topic's initial post · Post by **Villeroy** » Sun Apr 24, 2016 8:26 pm

Microsoft WordPad is the rtf editor for all Windows users. WordPad does not support insertion of notes. Therefore I assume that notes can not be stored in the rtf file format.

Post by **John_Ha** » Tue May 10, 2016 4:53 pm

SGB wrote:I have one overriding complaint: if OO can't/won't save inserted comments when you choose (in order to minimize cross-app/cross-platform incompatibilities) to create and save in RTF format, then why the $#%%# does it go through the &*$%%^$^ing motions? Why does it give you the false sense of security that it can? Why not just disable that functionality for RTF?

... because Writer cannot see into the future.

Writer does not know while you are editing that are going to be silly enough to save the file as a .rtf when .rtf files don't handle notes! Writer allows you to do the edits because the edits will be saved when you save as a .odt file.

Whenever you try to save a file in any format other than .odt, Writer warns you that you might lose data. You will not lose the edits unless you are silly enough to ignore the warning, or have been silly enough to switch off the warning when it was shown to earlier. The warning was switched on by default when you installed AOO.

What more can Writer do to protect you from yourself?

Incidentally, your complaint should be addressed to Microsoft, the author of the proprietary .rtf file format. .rtf is not an international, nor any any other, standard - it is a Microsoft owned thing. Complain to Microsoft that .rtf files purport to be cross platform but they do not support notes. Please let us know the response you get.

Post by **floris v** » Tue May 10, 2016 6:13 pm

To be sure, the RTF specification includes footnotes and endnotes, but many export filters to RTF don't implement it.
This a hard lesson, but you can rely on this: the native format of a word processor will save anything that it allows you to type or insert. However, many (unimportant) formatting details may get lost in conversion to another format. Lines below a header for instance will get lost in conversion to the MS Word format.

cathaven · Post by **cathaven** » Tue Mar 28, 2017 2:49 pm

I just had a similar problem. In my case, however, the document I edited was in the .rtf format to begin with. I ran the edit, added comments, saved & closed. When I reopened it, all the comments & thus almost all of the work was lost. I simply hadn't noticed that the original was .rtf when I opened it, or I would have converted to .doc format (this being the format editors & publishers insist on.)

I have now reset the options to warn me whenever I don't save in .doc format (which, as I already mentioned, is the format I have to submit work in.)

Post by **John_Ha** » Tue Mar 28, 2017 4:16 pm

cathaven wrote:I have now reset the options to warn me whenever I don't save in .doc format (which, as I already mentioned, is the format I have to submit work in.)

Be sure to read See [Tutorial] Differences between Writer and MS Word files for why you should always work in, and save all files, as .odt. Only create a copy as a .doc file to send, and be sure to delete it after sending it so you don't start editing it again.

NB Reading the thread suggests

1 notes can be saved in a .rtf file as notes are included in the file definition ...

2 ... but many applications, including AOO Writer, do not save notes when writing .rtf files

Hence "lost notes in my .rtf file" is caused by Writer not writing them to the .rtf file. The notes would, of course, have been written had you saved the document as a .odt file.

Always save all work in .odt files.

: Differences between Writer and MS Word; and between the various file formats

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