Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

Welcome beginner. Please answer all of the questions below which may provide information necessary to answer your question.
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Which version of OpenOffice.org are you using? 2.3.1
What Operating System (version) are you using? Windows XP
What is your question or comment? I just downloaded OpenOffice and have begun experimenting with Writer. Whenever I save a document to any format at all, it is saved automatically not as a document but as a StuffIt compressed file. When opened, it becomes not a document but a folder that contains items such as "content," "meta," "settings," and folders such as "Configurations2," "META-INF," and so forth. It's as though saving deconstructs a document into its component parts. Somehow, this just doesn't seem normal, and I don't get it.

In the Save As... dialogue, do you have Automatic file name extension enabled?

To "recover" the files already saved, try adding the OpenDocument extension (.odt, .ods, .odp etc) or if for any reason the file has a different extension try changing it, from for example .zip, to .odt (or .ods etc).

If there's no file name extension, Windows should be asking what program should be used to open the file. This sounds more like a file association problem. Check the options in Stuffit and make sure that Stuffit hasn't been set to open the open document files. If you uncheck the options in Stuffit, you may then have to change the file associations so that the files open with OpenOfifce.org.

How to change which program starts when you double-click a file in Windows XP

Thank you James and Bill. Unclicking automatic file name extension helps. I tried opening a Word file which works, of course. I'm not sure why, when saving as an OpenOffice document, the icon is still a Word one. I think I need to do some reading first and playing around afterward.