thomas steel wrote:
Dear Jim: Thank you for your help & especially for expressing it simply. I have spent hours trying to follow! I couldn't make your steps work, but I did manage to unhide extensions another way. One of the problem files (to take an example) has the extension: ".xlsm.xlsm" (inverted commas mine).
The extension .XLSM is one of the new MS Office 700 extensions (meaning EXCEL MACRO-ENABLED SPREADSHEET). This kind of file cannot be created by vanilla OpenOffice.org (except I believe possibly by a Novell version which generally only works properly on Novell machines). That the extension is duplicated suggests that, on saving, someone added an extension manually to the previously hidden extension. That shouldn’t matter.
So the question now becomes do you have MS Office 700 on your machine (perhaps inserted there by someone else) or supplied in a test version by Microsoft? Any such files, if they really are xmls files,must have been created with Microsoft Office 700. They were either created on your machine or they were sent to you via email, via internet, or via some outside media such as a CD. (Or someone has pasted incorrect extensions on them.)
You can download a free update to the older Office 2003 viewer programs from Microsoft at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/925180 . This website provides both the update program, installation information, and information as to where to find the 2003 viewers. Then you should be able to open at least those files with proper extension into a viewer and then copy and paste the document from the viewer into newly created OpenOffice file of the same type. That is, for example, if the file opens up in the Excel viewer, then you can copy its contents into the OffenOffice.org Calc program.
I have also found my way (again by another route) to 'Open with', which produces a list of scores of programme names, none recognisable to me. There is no 'scalc' among them (though there is a 'starcalc'). Can you please advise? (By the way I did ask what OOo was, but I now realise that it must be the same as OO). Can I also say that I'm grateful to
Well Star Office is essentially a version of OpenOffice.org produced, like OpenOffice.org by Star. See http://www.sun.com/software/star/staroffice/index.jsp . It provides a few extras including a lot of fonts that match those that come with Microsoft Office, a different database program, and a service agreement, for all of which you pay only $65.00 US. But it is essentially the same product as OpenOffice. “StarCalc” sounds like a name that refers to a spreadsheet in this product which should then be equally readable in the OpenOffice.org Calc program. It is in fact in StarOffice the name for the spreadsheet module which in OpenOffice. is called Calc. (It is also the name of an entirely independent astronomy program.)
A good way to find out what any extensions mean is to simply type them one at a time into Google on the internet and see what comes up. Or you can check at http://filext.com/ or at some other website that contains lists of extensions. (Proper Openoffice.org (and StarOffice) extensions are .odt or .ott for Writer (the Word processor) and .ods and .ots for Calc (the spreadsheet). Any files with those extensions (again unless someone has been changing extension on you) should open fine in OpenOffice.org.
Also, any Microsoft Office files should open somewhere between perfectly and reasonable well in OpenOffice.org, except for the new Office 2007 files.
Is it possible that you have a now-expired version of Microsoft Office on your machine and that you were using it believing that you were using OpenOffice? Or do you really have Star Office on your machine? I really don’t know. But it looks like your problem doesn’t have anything to do with OpenOffice.org per se.
Jim Allan --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
