Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

Greetings to all,

I have been using AOO for an age and generally I love it!

Recently,I have begun performing some volunteer editing work for aspiring writers. More often than not, they send their work to me as a file saved in .docx format. I have been returning their edited work to them saved in .rtf format, but some of them, especially Mac users, report unintended document formatting issues with the .rtf file.

Docx files, I presume, are proprietary to Microsoft, but I wonder if Writer has an extension yet that will permit files to be saved in the .docx fomat, or might I simply use the already included Windows 2000/XP .doc format without undue concern that it will screw up the edited file?

Any practical help or advice that can be offered will be appreciated.

Regards,

You will be better off with LibreOffice: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-fresh/

Send them .odt files because any version of MS Word which can write .docx files can both read and write .odt files.

See [Tutorial] Differences between Writer and MS Word files for more information.

If this solves the problem, please click the Edit button on your original post and add [Solved] in front of your subject.

DaddyDarkStar wrote:Greetings to all,
have been returning their edited work to them saved in .rtf format, but some of them, especially Mac users, report unintended document formatting issues with the .rtf file.

As floris says, you are likely a bit better off with LibreOffice which is reportedly more MS compatable. However you might want to see if saving in Word 97-2003 (.doc) works with AOO.

What you do not want to do is use RTF. It is an old and poorly documented MS format what is not well supported in AOO nor, I believe in LO.

Note that it is not a good idea to routinely save in .docx or .doc format. It is better to save in standard .odt format while you are working on the document and only export to MS format when ready to return the document to the author.

Every time you open or save into a foreign format the file goes through a translation process. While the translators are very good, tiny errors may accumulate over time and result in a damaged document.