[Solved] Setting OOo 2.4 to open MS Office docs

[wolflore]

Hi

Can someone help me. I've rerun the setup utility via Add/Remove programs so that OOo 2.4 is the default program for all MS Office documents. For some reason it doesn't seem to want to open DOC files. If I go in to the Properties dialogue box of a MS Word file and change the Opens with dialogue it just comes up with an unknown program.

Can anyone help?

Cheers
Anthony

PS - I'm running Microsoft Word for Windows® 97, on a PC running Windows 2000 Prof' (don't ask why!)

[Phil]

Hi,

I have a couple of questions in order to be able to help you:

So you have installed both Word 97 and OpenOffice on the same PC, right?
What happens if you double-click a .doc file in Windows Explorer?
Can you open .doc files if you start OpenOffice and use File > Open?
What about other MS Office files (.xls, .ppt) - do they work?

it just comes up with an unknown program.

Which programs are shown? Maybe you can post a screenshot of the dialog here?

KR, phil

[wolflore]

Hi,

Yes I have MS Word and OOo 2.4 installed on the same machine.

Here is a screen shot of a Word file's properties.


If you right click on the DOC file and 'Open With' swriter - ensuring to to select the always use this program option - the file will open with OOo.



When you click on the files after this is when it throws up the error that it can not find the file swriter.exe

What I did then was reopen the document properties. From there I selected the 'Change' button to swap to swriter - it was still set to open with MS Word.



Note the Change in file icon from the usual Word W to the one above the dialogue box.

Now, yesterday after I had done this an windows error still came up when you clicked on the file to open it. Today they open! Go figure

So, thank you for your time but the problem seems to have solved itself!?

Kind regards
Anthony

[Phil]

This is quite strange indeed, but if it works now everything is fine!

Did you do a reboot between yesterday and today?
Because that often sorts out all sorts of Windows problems including file associations etc.
So this might explain it...

Thanks for adding "[Solved]" at the beginning of your first post title (by using the edit button)!

Best regards,
phil

[wolflore]

Hi Phil,

I did a reboot yesterday which didn't seem to resolve the issue. Thought the rest over night did! Windows machines...don't you just love 'em!

[Phil]

Windows machines...don't you just love 'em!

Absolutely - things happening are really often weird!

Best regards,
phil