OpenOffice and Microsoft Office

[SuRichardson]

A document originally created in Excel and amended using openoffice will now not open when sent as an attachment to others who only have Excel. I understood the two systems to be compatible. Can anyone help please?

[ChuckFickens]

openoffice will open excel files and save them again as excel files quite happily, but it also has it's own format which excel cant open, so when it was saved using openoffice did whoever saved it make sure they saved it in excel format (.xls) and not in an openoffice format (.ods)

[SuRichardson]

Probably not - can it be amended and resaved as an excel file - or have they blown it now?

[Ethel]

Yes - it can certainly be amended and saved as .xls within OpenOffice. It doesn't even need to be amended - just reopened.

OpenOffice can be set to save docs and spreadsheets in the standard Office forrmat as default, by the way.

[SuRichardson]

How can I do that? It's just my partner is not very computer confident and probably opted for the first option offered. We only got the new computer and downloaded OO last weekend and I haven't had a chance to have a go. If I can set the default to save them as word and excel docs there will not be any problems, and we will all be happy!

[ChuckFickens]

on the tools menu select options then click on load/save and select general when it expands and then you should have a always save as option in the bottom right, click on that and look through them until you find Microsoft **** 97/2000/XP and click on ok

It's a global option, so if you set it in the spreadsheet program it will also mean the word processor will always save in MS office format

[SuRichardson]

Many thanks for your replies and help. I always know the Answerbank guys/girls will not let me down