| Posted By: roods |
| I have recently sent a couple of friends an e-mail with an open office writer document attached. They both say that they cannot open it. They both have MS Word. Anybody got any ideas? |
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| Posted By: Kwacka |
| Microsoft Word doesn't accept the ISO for documents, preferring to go their own way.
For some reason multinational firms and governments don't want one company to have control over whether or not they will be able to read their own documents if 10 years time.
This was brought home when a recent upgrade of Office meant that Word users couldn't access documents produced on versions earlier than 2003. In the latest versions of Office the way that mathematical symbols are handled means that many universities/journals have dropped the requirement that papers be presented in .doc formats.
Three possibilities
1. tell them to download the ODF converter for Word from http://sourceforge.net/projects/odf-converter. This has been funded by MS.
2. suggest they download OpenOffice themselves.
3. open the documents, and save them as Word .doc format rather than the standard .odt (the requirement for an international standard is obvious when you see that there are 3 or 4 varieties of .doc formats - if you save as Word 97 there's a good chance Word 2007 will be able to read it, but there may well be formatting difficulties if you do it the other way round).
As they are likely to be receiving more and more of these perhaps options 1 or 2 might be better for them (2 will be better for their pocket at least). |
| Posted By: roods |
| Kwacka, Many thanks for your reply. Problem now solved. |
| Posted By: Kwacka |
| Glad you're sorted - how did you get round it? |
| Posted By: roods |
| My friends declined options 1 & 2. (very suspicious about anything for free off the net!) I went with option 3. |
| Posted By: Kwacka |
| So they refuse to use programs such as BBC iPlayer, Flash, Java?
OpenOffice is produced mainly by in the region of 100 full-time employees of Sun Microsystems and is the basid for their 'StarOffice' suite (USD 69.95)
If they go to:
http://distribution.openoffice.org/cdrom/
they can pay someone to send them a CD with it on.
BTW, the Word extensions wasn't free, it was paid for by Microsoft. (They must be getting worried by all the governments (France, Brazil, South Africa, China, Mexico, India and many others) and companies around the world changing to OpenOffice. |