Really quick question about Open Office and Word

James,

Whenever you open a .doc file that has been formatted inside MS Word within OOo Writer, there are formatting issues.

Even though Writer can open a .doc file, it doesn't always keep your formatting as there are certain elements inside MS Word that aren't compatible with OOo Writer.

Really, the only thing you can do is open the .doc file using Writer and then manually make adjustments to it. Or start from scratch. If you want, I can try and help you if you want to PM me. I'd be glad to


Tracy

Thanks Tracy

I think I'm just gonna copy n paste and spend the next hour or so formatting.

James

It's just a preference really.

I find Word much easier to use.

I've edited and formatted the document now and PDF'd it up. It didn't take as long as I thought it would.

Thanks everyone for their help.

James

Just install PDFCreator in your Windows install...it installs a printer driver and you can print direct to PDFCreator, and the PDF files are great. In fact, the options are better than Ooo, so I usually use that to print rather than Ooo PDF function. But PDFCreator can be used with any print function. Occasionally, though, it messes things up. But usually (99%) it's fine.

Kenneth

Hey James,

Instead of copying and pasting your text from Word into OpenOffice (swriter) and then having to reformat everything, you can right click on the word doc, click Open With and select swriter and your file will open in OpenOffice.

You'll want to skim thru it and make any changes, for instance, if you've created a table of contents with links to the various chapters/sections, OpenOffice will have underlined the links. Or if you used carriage returns instead of page breaks to add a page you may have some issues. Or if you use images in your document, you may need to make sure they are positioned correctly.

But you shouldn't have any major editing to do if you open your document directly into OpenOffice the way I described above.

As for those add-ons for Word that use a PDF printer to convert doc to PDF. I've never found one that worked to my satisfaction. They always seem to throw the formatting off.

I can always tell when I receive a PDF ebook where the author used one of those, usually it's an ebook with MRR and they look like crap with big white spaces at the top of chapters and chapter headings at the bottom of the last page of the previous chapter (caused by someone using carriage returns instead of page breaks).

What a waste! Even if the content is good, the formatting looks so bad I'd never try to sell or even giveaway an ebook that looks so unprofessional.

HTH,
Tamara

PS: For those of you who are to young to remember an old-fashioned typewriter, carriage return = blank line