How to make openoffice compatible with microsoft word

I have known for some time, that the same text in different formats created different sized files. RTF seems to be the largest, followed closely by. DOC Until recently, I thought. No formatting, no font, etc etc But no,. ODT seems consistantly smaller — less than half the size, on average, of the same text in. TXT and it keeps the formatting! Is it doing something odd? Compressing the file, perhaps? Ask a Question Page.

Online tech support can, really, only do so much. If the document is very important you should immediately contact a qualified local computer technician to help you.

Documents can often be retrieved, unless you do something on your computer to overwrite them. Comments violating those rules will be removed. Comments that don't add value will be removed, including off-topic or content-free comments, or comments that look even a little bit like spam.

All comments containing links and certain keywords will be moderated before publication. I want comments to be valuable for everyone, including those who come later and take the time to read. Search Ask Leo! Do this Subscribe to Confident Computing! I'll see you there! We will all be better for it… And by the way, if the gent IT man who installed after fixing a virus on this chaps machine the OpenOffice Writer — he actually done the user a favour, as the Word prog was probably not registered anyway…!

Any idea as to how I can resolve this issue. Pretty much the same way you could in word — File menu, Open option. Some file formats are indeed compressed. I know that. Ask a Question Page Online tech support can, really, only do so much. Leave a reply: Before commenting please: Read the article. Although it contains many of the same features as Word, some people prefer the look and feel of Word better.

Using the five tips found in this article, you can make Writer look and function more like Microsoft Word. In fact, you can even play with the settings and create a more customized environment to suit your preferences.

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Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. Most writing, editing, and reviewing techniques in OOoWriter are similar to those in Microsoft Word, but the details often vary. Jump quickly to other parts of a document. Choose language for spelling checker. Note: OpenOffice. Ignore some text when checking spelling. Recheck spelling. Always rechecks.

Find and replace text, formatting, and styles. Use wildcards regular expressions in find and replace. Wildcards differ from those in MSWord. Choose, create, or edit a custom dictionary. Create exception exclude dictionary. As for custom dictionary, but select Exception [-] checkbox. Track changes choose options. Protect document for editing. Mark and track changes. Insert comments associated with a change.

Insert notes comments not associated with a change. Show changes as pop-up text. Merge documents. Accept or reject changes. Change document properties. Get a word count. Cannot get word count for selection without using add-in macro.

Create AutoText entry. Insert AutoText. Type shortcut and press F3. This section covers such things as margins, headers and footers, columns, and frames. OOoWriter controls basic page setup somewhat differently than Word does. Page setup paper size, orientation, margins, and so on is a property of the document as a whole. To change the setup for a page, you need to define a separate section with the changed setup.

For example, if you specify headers and footers, they apply to the entire document, unless you change them in specific sections. Page setup is a property of the page style. If you change the page layout for one page style, only that style will be affected. When you set up a page style, you can specify which page style applies to the next page, so when text flows from one page to the next, the correct page style will automatically apply to the following pages.

For example, you could specify a First Page style to be followed by a Left Page style, to be followed by a Right Page style, to be followed by a Left Page style—a common setup in books. Define margins.

Specify different headers and footers on first, odd, and even pages. Define different page styles for First, Left even , and Right odd pages, using Header and Footer tabs. Edit headers and footers. After you have specified Header and Footer areas for a page, they are always active. Single-click to type or insert fields. Change from roman to arabic page numbers in the footer of a page. Insert a manual page break and apply a different page style.

Use paragraph styles for page layout. Can define paragraph styles with offset from left margin, with heading styles aligned left or right. Use columns for page layout. Insert continuous sections to switch from single to multiple columns on one page. Use frames or text boxes for page layout. Frames are used in Word 97 but mostly replaced by text boxes in Word and ; can be linked to flow text from one to next, as in a newsletter.

Use tables for page layout. Put portrait headers on landscape pages. Use rotated text box linked to header. Use rotated text in a frame. Set first page number to greater than 1.

View and edit facing pages. You cannot edit in page preview mode. A full discussion of the similarities and differences in the use of templates and styles would take too long for this summary document, but the following table should get you started.

Find which template is associated with a document.