Using Open Office
For those of you who attended the program on OPEN SOURCE with Nicole Engard of LibLime, I mentioned there is a way to set the defaults in Open Office so that documents will automatically be saved in an MS Office form…. I emailed the person who brought this up, but thought I would also post it here for anyone else who was there and/or anyone else’s interest.
If you have anything to add, please share. If you have questions, let me know! 
Open the Open Office Word program
Go to TOOLS menu
Click on OPTIONS
Click on LOAD SAVE (click on the little plus sign to the left to open up this drop down menu)
You should see
General
VBA Properties
Microsoft Office
HTML Compatibility
Click on GENERAL
Look for the part that says DEFAULT FILE FORMAT
You can set this to be:
Document Type: Text Document Always save as: (and mine is on Microsoft Word 97/2000/XP)
[You can also do something similar if you upgrade to MS Office 2007 and want to be sure that your documents are compatible with people still using MS Office 2003 or earlier - you go into the default savings settings and have them save as MS Word 97/2000/XP so that people can open them even if they don’t yet have MS Office 2007.
This works for all the programs in the MS Office 2007 package. We did this in the office when we upgraded to MS Office 2007 b/c a lot of people are waiting and/or not upgrading to 2007. If you want/need more info on this, please let me know.]
There are other versions of MS Word in the drop down list for Open Office and other possible formats to “always save as” but I find this choice for Word is the one that covers most.
You can see that you can use the DOCUMENT TYPE drop down box to choose other types of documents that you might do in Open Office Writer and set their ALWAYS SAVE AS types.
Click OKAY
You have now made this the default document save-as type. When you save and send your Open Office documents and send them to someone with WORD only, they will work!
You can do the same type things with the other Open Office products and MS Office products, i.e., set the default document type ’save as’ for the PowerPoint type Open Office program to be MS PowerPoint, and same for Excel, etc.
