Solidworks and writer

[suba]

In the past OpenOffice writer has taken the place of word for every situation, however with the newer solidworks releases I have run into a few problems. One of the new features is the 'design journal' feature which allows you to keep notes and insert screen shots at any time. The journal itself appears to be stored as part of the solidworks part or assembly file with no external reference. Even with open office set as the default the feature won't work unless you have word installed (not sure which version it requires though). Anybody have any insight on how openoffice could be set up to work in this case?

[Villeroy]

You have a problem with "solidworks" (whatever that is). Why not ask the community/company of "solidworks"?

[Dave]

So...which aspect of Writer are you using in conjunction with Solidworks? What particular problem are you encoutnering? Are you expecting to export notes from one to the other, or diagrams? They are worlds apart, one being a word processor, the other a 2D/3D CAD program. Have you checked out Solid Edge?

David.

[acknak]

Lots of third-party software is tightly integrated with MS Office. MS makes it very easy to do, ensuring that "everybody has Office".

Villeroy is right, you'll have to ask the solidworks people why they want you to be tied to MS through their product. You could also ask them to support OpenOffice too. In fact, they can (legally!) bundle or incorporate OOo with their product, making things simpler for their customers also.

[suba]

Well, I would love to ask them, if as a student I was able to own a copy of the several thousand dollar software. I was mainly just checking to see if anyone happened to know of a setting that I was unaware of that could make things work together. I'll keep checking around. Thanks