external format warning - need explaination

[rox731]

I am using the oo1.1.4 version, just downloaded it tonight. When I went into the "text document" section and wrote a cute little story and clicked "Save As...". I clicked that as a WindowsXP (.doc). Everything was fine until I went to close out competley and it gave me this warning...

Saving in external formats my have caused information loss. Do you still want to close?

Now, should I be concerned or does it do this everytime you don't use the XML format that it likes? It saved it just fine...I checked. But my husband will be using this I just set it up for him. I want all my answers for him. By the way, I checked YES I wanted to close and save.

Please advise.
Rox

[Comfortably_Numb]

Short answer: This is completely normal and you have nothing to worry about.

More indepth answer: The problem with saving to 'external formats' is that they often tend to be closed, meaning that the developers have to guess about how to save your work in this way, which means some data could get lost or arranged in a different way to what you had intended. While the developers work hard to guess correctly, and have done a sterling job when it comes to saving in 'external formats' (such as .doc) they're not always right but you only really need to be concerned if your document contains really complex formatting and such.

Hope that helped.

Edit: Made the post make a bit more sense than the inital jibberish rambling. It's late and I'm tired.
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OpenOffice.org 1.1.4-r1 on Gentoo GNU/Linux.

[rox731]

Thank you so much for a quick reply. Hubby will be using mostly the .doc formats for his work.

Rox