Christian F.K. Schaller

Blog talking about Fedora, GNOME, GStreamer and related topics. Anything I write in this blog is me speaking as a member of the open source community, official Red Hat communication happens on Redhat.com. The comments are my own personal opinion.

OpenOffice almost ate my document

Posted on February 20, 2007 by uraeus

I spent quite some time yesterday trying to editing a document I had been sent. I didn’t actually check the file format before I loaded it into OpenOffice, but today I found that it was a RTF file. Anyway, the editing went well and I saved my changes without thinking about it and sent the document of to the people I was corresponding with. Then today I got a mail back that the document was unreadable. It was at this point I realized it was a RTF file and not a Doc file I had been sent.
I tried loading the file in OpenOffice and it failed miserably. So it turns out that OpenOffice exports RTF which neither it or Microsoft office is able to read.

Out of the blue came my saviour. Abiword was able to import the document and save it again in a RTF format that OpenOffice was able to read and all my changes to the document were saved from oblivion.
Abiword had a weird error where it ‘blinked’ on certain section of the document, but that was a small issue compared to the almost destruction caused by OpenOffice :)

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