Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

Is there any way to trick an application that makes a call to MS Word.exe to use OO instead? In the application we use it is an imbeded call to word.exe and I would like to avoide all the MS-cal's involved just for viewing and merging information on a document. Thanks

It might be possible but it depends on the level of integration between the application and Word, and it is very difficult to know without understanding what application is involved. At the simplest level your application might just create a DOC file and then in effect do a system call (there are a couple of ways of doing this) to in effect run word with this temporary document. If your application works this way then it might be possible to create a fix.

However most applications integrate with Word with a remote procedure protocol known as DCOM. The issue there is that whilst OOo also suopprts, DCOM the actual calls and syntax are different, so if you swap out Word and substitute OOo then the application would get confused and error.

What is the application and how does it use Word?

The application is Misys Tiger a medical billing software. When I click on a form within the program it gives me the warning that Word8 or better is not installed. I posted at their web site about hard coding and they said yes it is hard coded to word.exe. There is no place where I can substitute the command myself. It look like I am out of luck on this one unless I could rename OOwriter to word and somehow register the dll. I think I'm dreaming though.

The billing software opens Word by calling word.exe -- what else? I guess, something has to be written into a Word document. Shurely, this is not implemented by sending key strokes to the Word application. I guess, they use COM or something to use Word's API. You can call OOo's API through COM, but Word's API is a completely different architecture than OOo. You have got to talk to a completely different animal to make it perform the same trick.