Hi :) +1 to most of all that people have said previously. The best work-around is to give people the link to the download page for LibreOffice. It is easily possible to install LibreOffice alongside MS Office. The default settings set LO up like that. At one of the last screens of the installer it offers to make LO the default program for opening the MS Office formats but the boxes are all unticked by default anyway :)
Doc is not perfect but it seems to be the best one (at the moment) for sharing and collaborating. Just avoid writing or using macros if you can. If the person receiving your documents doesn't need to edit them then Pdf is best. Either way keeping an original in odt is smart. In Europe apparently around 20% of people use LibreOffice or OpenOffice. In Brazil it's much higher. Hopefully it will increase elsewhere too as LO becomes more widely used. There are a lot of extra wrinkles in the complexities of all this. MS Office 2007 and 2010 can both read odt but only the older versions. Most programs can read/write the newer Odt format that LibreOffice defaults to but are also quite happy with the older versions. So, as Stephan Zietsman says go to Tools - Options - "+Load / Save" - General In the middle in the section "Default file format and ODF settings" see the first line is "ODF format version" change the drop-down menu beside it from "1.2 Extended (reccommended)", scroll upwards 2 places to set it at "1.0 / 1.1". Now even MS Office should be able to read/write new Odt files you send them. So, this should be a good format to keep original documents in. Also at the bottom of the same section use the 2 drop-down menus to set the default format for "text documents" (not text-files (weirdly)) to "Microsoft Office (97/2000/Xp)" or to "Rich text format" but the proper MS Office one is better. The MS Office one is 1 or 2 places further backwards up the list. When you save documents a pop-up may appear (you can disable it but it's probably best to keep it). It tends to be a little confusing as to which option saves in the default you set and which saves in the normal Odf format that is native to LibreOffice (and most other programs). While most people still seem to use Doc a few try to urge for Rtf. Generally those few seem to think that Rtf is a safer format, one that is not proprietary and not dependant on Microsoft developing it. Sadly Microsoft do own it and their own programs never quite implemented it properly so that different versions of Word, Wordpad etc all have differences in the way they display a document saved in that format. This was bad enough when MS were developing the format but now they have stopped developing it at all. So, any bugs and problems will remain and if any new security issues arise they will go unfixed too. MS's newer DocX supposedly does everything that the Rtf was supposed to be able to do (but never quite got there). Of course the newer DocX also doesn't quite achieve the compatibility that it promises either. The 'advantage' with DocX is that it forces people into buying the latest versions of MS Office. Also since this new 'Open' 'ISO standard' is implemented differently on each release of MS Office it forces people to buy the newest version (MS Office 2010) even tho they may already have the slightly older MS Office 2007 and the newer one is due out fairly 'soon' (within a year or so). According to a Microsoft.com link i found on Thursday/Friday there are also likely to be differences depending on which OS you run MS Office on. So, apparently there are differences if running MS Office 2010 on Win7 or Xp (or Vista). With Odt it doesn't matter which OS you are using. Sadly there are sometimes differences when opening with different programs but LibreOffice devs and most of the rest of us consider it a bug worth fixing when/if it is found that LO doesn't implement some aspect of the standard properly. OASIS have finally set the specification for the 1.2 but many programs had already been using that as the default for ages as it took so long to finally agree it. MS Office stuck with the older 1.0/1.1 specification using the excuse/reason that it was the last known stable version. Lets hope the future MS Office release uses the 1.2 instead. Regards from Tom :) -- View this message in context: http://nabble.documentfoundation.org/can-I-make-Libre-default-to-save-as-rtf-tp3527035p3527551.html Sent from the Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com. -- For unsubscribe instructions e-mail to: [email protected] Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
