Articles > Open Office - A configuration option

This page is intended to instruct users how to configure OpenOffice so that its documents can be shared with users of Microsoft Office.

OpenOffice will work for you straight away, opening Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents with no problems. An issue might arise, however, when you save a document and then send it to someone else. They might not be able to open the document if they don't have Open Office installed. So what we can do is to instruct our OpenOffice program to save all files in Microsoft Office format (seeing as most users use this).

This is how you do it...

For OpenOffice Writer (equivalent of Microsoft Word):

1. Open OpenOffice Writer
2. Go to Tools > Options > Load/Save > General
3. Where it says: "Always save as" change this from "OpenDocument Text" to either "Microsoft Word 97/2000/XP" or "Rich Text Format"
4. Click OK.

For OpenOffice Calc (equivalent of Microsoft Excel):

1. Open OpenOffice Calc
2. Go to Tools > Options > Load/Save > General
3. Where it says "Document Type" change this from "Text document" to "Spreadsheet"
4. Where it says: "Always save as" change this from "OpenDocument Text" to "Microsoft Excel 97/2000/XP"
5. Click OK.

1. Open OpenOffice Impress
2. Click "Create"
3. Go to Tools > Options > Load/Save > General
4. Where it says "Document Type" change this from "Text document" to "Presentation"
5. Where it says: "Always save as" change this from "OpenDocument Text" to either "Microsoft PowerPoint 97/2000/XP"
6. Click OK.

Now you're all set. You can open Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, edit them, create them and share them with ease.

This is only a suggested configuration method. It would be nice to see everyone using OpenOffice in which case these documents could be shared with ease without taking the above steps. Why not have both Microsoft Office and OpenOffice on your computer?! We have! So if you haven't yet installed OpenOffice,we suggest you do it now!