Losing formatting when saving as .doc

Discuss the word processor
Post Reply
jrobbie82
Posts: 3
Joined: Fri Jul 01, 2011 12:35 am

Losing formatting when saving as .doc

Post by jrobbie82 »

I'm having a problem regarding saving an openoffice writer document as a Word .doc document and losing formatting.

I'm a student and have been writing papers, as i'm writing the paper, i'll just save it as an .odt document as I go along.
When I go to submit my paper, my teachers request it in .doc format. I'll have my paper "ready to go", and i'll have changed the margin sizes and inserted the header to put the title and page number.

Then when I save it as a .doc file, it appears to be okay, so close out of the program. However, when I open the document back up, my margins, header, title/page number, all gone... (It's like this opening the document back up in openoffice as I do not have MS Office installed on my PC)

Can anyone tell me how to fix this??? Very frustrating.
Open Office 3.2.1 running on Microsoft Windows Vista
User avatar
RoryOF
Moderator
Posts: 34586
Joined: Sat Jan 31, 2009 9:30 pm
Location: Ireland

Re: Losing formatting when saving as .doc

Post by RoryOF »

There is no certain fix; you might try AbiWord to see if its .doc support is better. It may also be that your college offer a special deal on MS Word.
Apache OpenOffice 4.1.15 on Xubuntu 22.04.4 LTS
esperantisto
Volunteer
Posts: 578
Joined: Mon Oct 08, 2007 1:31 am

Re: Losing formatting when saving as .doc

Post by esperantisto »

Can you share a sample document? Normally, paper size and margins are kept well when exporting a document to Word DOC. So are headers/footers except for one particular case: when you use the First Page style for, yes, your first page. If this is the case, try making a manual page break after the first page (with the Default or any other required style) instead of allowing smooth text flow.
AOO 4.2.0 (of 2015) / LO 7.x / Win 7 / openSUSE Linux Leap 15.4 (64-bit)
User avatar
floris v
Volunteer
Posts: 4423
Joined: Wed Nov 28, 2007 1:21 pm
Location: Netherlands

Re: Losing formatting when saving as .doc

Post by floris v »

If you used the First Page page style to get different headers on your first and other pages, you will lose headers in conversion to Word. Margins should be kept though.
OpenOffice 4.1.11 on Ubuntu; LibreOffice 6.4 on Linux Mint, LibreOffice 7.6.2.1 on Ubuntu
If your problem has been solved or your question has been answered, please edit the first post in this thread and add [Solved] to the title bar.
Nederlandstalig forum
User avatar
acknak
Moderator
Posts: 22756
Joined: Mon Oct 08, 2007 1:25 am
Location: USA:NJ:E3

Re: Losing formatting when saving as .doc

Post by acknak »

AOO4/LO5 • Linux • Fedora 23
Post Reply