[libreoffice-users] Re: can I make Libre default to save as .rtf

Hi :)
+1 
to most of all that people have said previously.  

The best work-around is to give people the link to the download page for
LibreOffice.  It is easily possible to install LibreOffice alongside MS
Office.  The default settings set LO up like that.  At one of the last
screens of the installer it offers to make LO the default program for
opening the MS Office formats but the boxes are all unticked by default
anyway :)

Doc is not perfect but it seems to be the best one (at the moment) for
sharing and collaborating.  Just avoid writing or using macros if you can. 
If the person receiving your documents doesn't need to edit them then Pdf is
best.  Either way keeping an original in odt is smart.  In Europe apparently
around 20% of people use LibreOffice or OpenOffice.  In Brazil it's much
higher.  Hopefully it will increase elsewhere too as LO becomes more widely
used.  

There are a lot of extra wrinkles in the complexities of all this.  MS
Office 2007 and 2010 can both read odt but only the older versions.  Most
programs can read/write the newer Odt format that LibreOffice defaults to
but are also quite happy with the older versions.  So, as Stephan Zietsman
says go to 

Tools - Options - "+Load / Save" - General

In the middle in the section
"Default file format and ODF settings"  
see the first line is 
"ODF format version" change the drop-down menu beside it from "1.2 Extended
(reccommended)", scroll upwards 2 places to set it at "1.0 / 1.1".  Now even
MS Office should be able to read/write new Odt files you send them.  So,
this should be a good format to keep original documents in.  

Also at the bottom of the same section use the 2 drop-down menus to set the
default format for "text documents" (not text-files (weirdly)) to "Microsoft
Office (97/2000/Xp)" or to "Rich text format" but the proper MS Office one
is better.  The MS Office one is 1 or 2 places further backwards up the
list.  

When you save documents a pop-up may appear (you can disable it but it's
probably best to keep it).  It tends to be a little confusing as to which
option saves in the default you set and which saves in the normal Odf format
that is native to LibreOffice (and most other programs).  

While most people still seem to use Doc a few try to urge for Rtf.   
Generally those few seem to think that Rtf is a safer format, one that is
not proprietary and not dependant on Microsoft developing it.  Sadly
Microsoft do own it and their own programs never quite implemented it
properly so that different versions of Word, Wordpad etc all have
differences in the way they display a document saved in that format.  This
was bad enough when MS were developing the format but now they have stopped
developing it at all.  So, any bugs and problems will remain and if any new
security issues arise they will go unfixed too.  MS's newer DocX supposedly
does everything that the Rtf was supposed to be able to do (but never quite
got there).  Of course the newer DocX also doesn't quite achieve the
compatibility that it promises either.  The 'advantage' with DocX is that it
forces people into buying the latest versions of MS Office.  Also since this
new 'Open' 'ISO standard' is implemented differently on each release of MS
Office it forces people to buy the newest version (MS Office 2010) even tho
they may already have the slightly older MS Office 2007 and the newer one is
due out fairly 'soon' (within a year or so).  

According to a Microsoft.com link i found on Thursday/Friday there are also
likely to be differences depending on which OS you run MS Office on.  So,
apparently there are differences if running  MS Office 2010 on Win7 or Xp
(or Vista).  

With Odt it doesn't matter which OS you are using.  Sadly there are
sometimes differences when opening with different programs but LibreOffice
devs and most of the rest of us consider it a bug worth fixing when/if it is
found that LO doesn't implement some aspect of the standard properly.  OASIS
have finally set the specification for the 1.2 but many programs had already
been using that as the default for ages as it took so long to finally agree
it.  MS Office stuck with the older 1.0/1.1 specification using the
excuse/reason that it was the last known stable version.  Lets hope the
future MS Office release uses the 1.2 instead.  

Regards from
Tom :)

--
View this message in context: 
http://nabble.documentfoundation.org/can-I-make-Libre-default-to-save-as-rtf-tp3527035p3527551.html
Sent from the Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

-- 
For unsubscribe instructions e-mail to: users+help@global.libreoffice.org
Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/
Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette
List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/
All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted