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? 2.4X
What Operating System (version) are you using? Vista - hell w/ Svc Pack1
What is your question or comment?
I have been sailing along so far in Open Ofc thankful that it is an option not to have to fully go into the Vista World.

I was working earlier today in the spreadsheet. saving the documents as I went. one I saved as open ofc, the others I said, yeah sure save in XL 97 format.
When I returned home to work on these spreadsheets more - I now cannot open them!
I get an error message back saying they are in an unrecognized format.
I noticed they had an ".xlsx" extension so I went it and changed the extension to ".xls"
no luck - same error message.

the same thing actually happened to one of the word proccsing files I was working with too. the error message was "winword file nto recognized"

So I am re-installing oo 2.4 and askign it to repair anything that was corrupt, etc.
but this is a real drag to deal with during finals.

hopester wrote:When I returned home to work on these spreadsheets more - I now cannot open them!
I get an error message back saying they are in an unrecognized format.
I noticed they had an ".xlsx" extension so I went it and changed the extension to ".xls"
no luck - same error message.

Are you sure you are working with the files created with OpenOffice.org? and xlsx file is created only (for now) by MS Office 2007 and higher. This is a new format that Microsoft introduced for their latest version of MS Office.

Also... simply changing the file extension will rarely ever help you resolve a problem like this. There is more to it than a simple file naming issue. Microsoft file formats are generally binary formats, and you must use software to convert from one format to another.

First.. look closely at what you are using to create your spreadsheets. If you create the spreadsheet with OpenOffice.org Calc, and save as Office 97 format (with the Automatic File extensions option in the Save As dialog checked) you will never get an xlsx file.

Second, try opening the xlsx file in MS Excel 2007... and then saving as an older format. That file should then be recognized by Calc.

OpenOffice.org 3.0 will support opening the docx, xlsx, and pptx formatted files.

hopester wrote:I noticed they had an ".xlsx" extension so I went it and changed the extension to ".xls"

Just renaming can't work, see here why: MS Office 2007 file format (docx, xslx, pptx, ppsx).