Hi mark,
i don't know which AOO Version you use or which operating system. What
you describe does not sound good. I hope you have a backup.
To work directly from USB stick can delay a write operation in a system.
AOO prior to 4.1.17, did not take a delayed write into account. It
always assumed that write is done immediately by the OS.
What this means is if older versions of AOO write the work and the write
operation is interfered with because for example you removed the USB
stick, cut power or anything else, the file will be empty.
You can confirm this by open the file with a text editor. If you see
gibberish something else has happened, if the text editor shows ####
then your file got corrupted in an incomplete write.
The ### are data fragments from the OS that has been added and now read
as data, and not as data from the OS.
We changed this behavior in AOO 4.1.17 in 2 ways.
1) AOO will now wait for a confirmation from the OS of a successful write.
2) AOO will no longer delete the file. It will write a temporary file,
and in the last step move the file into the original. This should ensure
that you will at all cost have some version, in case of catastrophic
failure.
This comes at the cost that writes take longer and needs more space on
your disk until the operation is completed.
I hope it encourage you to update to the latest version, and to create
backups. While this was a long standing hard to reproduce behavior, and
even harder to understand what is happening, this is not the only danger
that can happen in modern complex IT environments.
I hope I could explain in a meaningful way to you what has likely
happened. I am assuming from your description of course.
All the best
Peter
Am 21.10.2026 um 01:49 schrieb Mark Eady:
To whom it may concern
Today I opened my calc spreadsheet on my USB (which I do weekly) and after inputting 4 bits of
information into 4 boxes I got an error message pop up which I closed to then get another pop up
and then closed the spreadsheet and now the spreadsheet won't open. When I double click on the
selected document I now get a message box with a great big list saying in the top left corner next
to your icon Filter Selection, I have tried the 2 options that are open office.org XML 1.0
spreadsheet and I get 2 error messages (probably the same one as earlier), the first is
"Unknown Graphic format" and then the second is "General error. General
input/output error." and I get this when trying other options from the list to.
The other documents on the flash drive (spreadsheets and text documents)
open as normal. I have copied the document from the flash drive and put it onto
my desktop as well.
Many thanks (I hope that this is an easy fix 🤞)
Mark
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