Sharing documents with MS Word Users, Word Count, Comment...

earlycj5 · Last edited by earlycj5 on Wed Oct 22, 2008 5:56 am; edited 1 time in total

Ok, so I work with OpenOffice, I genuinely prefer using it and the way it handles styles to MS Word.

Most folks I work with use MS Word. Not a problem, right? Well, recently I've had a few issues crop up.

For some reason in Office 2003 it seems that you cannot;
Track changes - if I saved the document without this enabled, it cannot be in Word,
Comment - it's simply greyed out,
Word count - I just found out a few minutes ago that word count is grayed out now as well.

I've saved the file as a .doc, is there something that I've got set somewhere that prevents these things? You can make changes to the document and save it, so it's not read only.

Thanks for any insight.
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earlycj5 · Posted: Wed Oct 22, 2008 5:55 am Post subject:

Anyone or am I stuck installing MS Office just to have compatibility?
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earlycj5 · Posted: Tue Oct 28, 2008 10:49 am Post subject:

Ok, I figured something out.

Maybe now someone will be willing to help?

If in Word I got to Tools -> Options -> Security and hit the "Unprotect" button, I'm able to change formatting, insert comments, page numbers, etc.

Why is OpenOffice "protecting" the document? I don't see any place that I've set this option to always "protect" documents upon saving as a .doc file???
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floris_v · Posted: Tue Oct 28, 2008 11:14 am Post subject:

Conversion from ODF to Word format isn't perfect. You may have some things in your file that causes the conversion to insert evil code like the protection stuff you encountered. There may already be an issue filed on your problem, maybe a new one should be added.
By the way, we aren't the developers, you don't have to tell us you think OOo is superior to Word; we're just other users trying to help each other.
You can help by telling what version of OOo you're using, and what version of Windows (I assume you use Windows). Cool

Hope this answers some of your questions.
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earlycj5 · Posted: Tue Oct 28, 2008 11:25 am Post subject:

Firstly thank you for a response. I felt like I was talking to myself here. If more information is needed then tell me what I need to provide and I'm happy to so I can fix the problem, but please don't just ignore me. It's frustrating enough, this is viewed as a problem with "my" software, not with the "other" software, I'm sure you know that though. Wink

Sorry, no I'm a Linux user through and through, my collaborators use Windows.

I've been running back and forth between my lab where I have a computer with XP and my office Ubuntu trying to figure this out.

This occurs with versions 2.4 and 3.0 of OpenOffice, I've tried creating and saving, and resaving on both Linux and Windows with OpenOffice and MSOffice. All combinations that I can think of for saving and opening. It's definitely something with just this file. I can create new files and it this doesn't happen. I tried to unprotect an index that exists in the file to no avail.

I'll keep looking for answers, at least for the time being the person on the other end has the option of "unprotect document".

Thanks.
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floris_v · Posted: Tue Oct 28, 2008 11:43 am Post subject:

Do you have the OOo version from www.openoffice.org or the one that comes with Ubuntu?
By the way, I don't know all the answers. Wink

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earlycj5 · Posted: Tue Oct 28, 2008 11:48 am Post subject:

floris_v · Posted: Tue Oct 28, 2008 12:01 pm Post subject:

I'm asking that because those versions aren't identical. And I don't have Linux.
One thing you can do is upload your document to for instance www.mediafire.com - replace all relevant text by dummy text if the content is confidential - so that people can test it on their computer and maybe come along with a suggestion for solving this problem.
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earlycj5 · Posted: Tue Oct 28, 2008 12:08 pm Post subject:

floris_v · Posted: Tue Oct 28, 2008 12:19 pm Post subject:

You can replace pretty much each word in the text by gibberish with the following regular expression: \<[a-zA-Z]+\> (it won't find words with accented letters). Enter the regexp in the Find box, enter some random characters in the replace box, select More options and check Use regular expressions, then hit Replace all. Make sure you do all of that in a copy of your file!
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Hagar Delest · Posted: Wed Oct 29, 2008 1:33 am Post subject:

Perhaps it comes from that old bug: [Solved] .doc files open write protected in Ooo 2.4. If not, we really need to see the file.

BTW, Ubuntu version is different from the official (Sun) one, see here: [Ubuntu] Installing OOo on Debian and Co.
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earlycj5 · Posted: Wed Oct 29, 2008 8:17 am Post subject:

Hagar Delest · Posted: Wed Oct 29, 2008 12:21 pm Post subject:

There has been a problem with Sun's servers indeed. It's fine now.
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earlycj5 · Posted: Wed Oct 29, 2008 1:21 pm Post subject:

Yup, this describes it I think.

http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=7385

Using Bibus it inserts the bibliography as a table that is protected against manual changes.

This is with OpenOffice 3.0.

I'll try the steps you outlined to unprotect the sections.
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