How to Open File on Flash Drive?

[swervinirvin]

Hi, I'm a newbie to Open Office and I know I'm dumb, but I cannot find a way to open a file on a drive other than the Mac internal hard drive. Here's what I'm doing: I go to File / Open, then hit the "up one level button" repeatedly. But it stops when I reach the root directory of the Mac hard drive. I can find no way to access, see, or open any files on my USB flash drive. I'm on an iMac with OSX Leopard, using Open Office X11.app 2.0 (p.s. I'm also new to Mac). Any suggestions? Thanks!

[Hagar Delest]

I move your thread to the Mac forum.

But as a basic advice, you should never work on files directly on your removable media. Copy them on your HD and work on them from here. First you'll have better time responses because the HD is much quicker and second, it's much safer. If there is a problem during transfer, you still have the file on your HD and you can try again. If there is a problem when the application is working on the file, it may be definitively corrupted.

[smsm1]

At the top go to Volumes, then the name of your drive. You are looking at the way that unix sees your hard drive.

[wurzel]

I can find no way to access, see, or open any files on my USB flash drive. I'm on an iMac with OSX Leopard, using Open Office X11.app 2.0 (p.s. I'm also new to Mac). Any suggestions? Thanks!

Hi,

Other than navigating to the Volumes directory as indicated from within the Open file dialog of OpenOffice.org, you should be able to see your files directly on your flash drive from your desktop, assuming that it mounts correctly on the desktop (I have not met a flash disk yet that doesn't on Mac OSX). If you press Ctrl and click at the same time on the file that you want to open, you can then choose "Open with..." and select OpenOffice.org from the list of applications. You might have to switch the view to show all available applications, because for some reason Apple doesn't consider X11 apps to be real applications. You might even have an option in the Open with dialog to tell the system to always open files of that type with the version of OpenOffice.org you have selected.


Alex