At 20:04 19/05/2008 -0400, Jason Cipriani wrote:
When I start Writer, and go to File -> Open and choose a .txt file, it then displays the data import dialog and opens it in Calc instead (...huh?).
At 20:35 19/05/2008 -0400, Jason Cipriani wrote:
This doesn't seem right, though, it's clearly not what I want to happen, because I'm opening the file from the file menu in Writer, not in Calc.
At 21:17 19/05/2008 -0400, Jason Cipriani wrote:
... (to rant, OO Writer shouldn't be making decisions like this at all -- if I wanted to use Calc I would've double-clicked the Calc icon not the Writer icon).
I accept that you have a genuine problem here and am pleased that you have found some workarounds.
But, for what it's worth, I think that the designers of OpenOffice would say of your comments above that you are looking at this the wrong way. You say that you are "opening the file from the file menu in Writer, not in Calc", and that if you "wanted to use Calc [you] would've double-clicked the Calc icon not the Writer icon". But there are not separate applications called Writer and Calc, of course: rather a single application called OpenOffice that can create and edit documents of different types, including text (Writer) and spreadsheet (Calc). When you use File | Open..., you are not doing so from Writer or from Calc but just from OpenOffice.
The only sense in which you have Writer or Calc open is that you may already have another Writer or Calc document open when you go to open your existing file - but that's an irrelevance. And when you choose to start either Writer or Calc, you are merely starting OpenOffice with a new, empty document of one type or the other. (And you need neither document, of course, if your purpose is immediately to open your existing problem document.)
This philosophy means that - as I understand it - OpenOffice chooses how it opens existing documents not with reference to which component you think you are using but from the extension to the file name and the contents of the file. This does create problems of the sort you describe.
At 03:18 20/05/2008 -0400, Jason Cipriani wrote:
a) File -> Open should do exactly what File -> New then Insert -> File does (I'm not sure why it wouldn't), ...
Why? Because with File | Open... the document type has to be determined anew (and as described above); with Insert | File... the document already exists, and you determined its type by choosing it. One could argue, of course, that having these two routes have potentially different results provides extra functionality: just use whichever you need.
This behaviour may well be different from that of other office suites you may have encountered. That doesn't make it good or bad, of course. For the avoidance of doubt, I'm not particularly advocating this philosophy - just describing it.
I trust this helps. Brian Barker --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
