Default Save to MSOffice formats?

[cvc1968]

I know it may seem counterintuitive, but is there any way to change the default save format to MS Office formats (.doc, .xls, .ppt). I am trying very hard to end my company's MS Office dependency but this seems to be a huge stumbling block.

My boss and others in the office pretty much only use Word and Excel, and have to share those files with many clients and vendors using MSOffice apps on Mac and PC platforms (and most, if not all, of those are NOT up do date with the most recent versions of Office that perhaps can read the .odt formats). And although I agree that clicking a popup menu and selecting the Word format shouldn't be too much of a strain on anyone, I simply CANNOT get most of our staff to remember to do that. This results in many instances of having to re-save and re-send files and costs time and money.

This is a problem I have encountered in all the alternative apps I've tried. I think it hinders adoption of applications such as Neooffice. It's all well and good to have proprietary formats, but the fact of the matter is that .doc and .xls are far and away the most common business formats in the world. Since you CAN save or export to those formats in most apps, I don't see the harm in making them the default -- for compatibility sake.

Understand, as I am constantly reminded, that many people in an office environment (especially the older set) have barely been able to learn to use software, so anything that makes them have to think about things like this can be problematic. I would love to take the attitude that they should learn to use computers or get out of the business, but that isn't productive or feasible.

In any case, if there is no way to change the default save formats, then we will just have to be stuck with MSOffice indefinitely.

[ovvldc]

Fortunately, this is easy to do, probably in less tiime than it took you to write your message.

Switch to NeoOffice.
Go the the NeoOffice -> Preferences menu. You will get a window with all sorts of options.
Go to Load/Save -> General. At the bottom you will find a heading called 'Default file format'.
Set the text document to 'Microsoft Word 97/2000/XP' and do the same, mutatis mutandis, for spreadsheet and presentation documents.

Presto.

Best wishes,
Oscar

[sardisson]

And to (hopefully) save everyone the trouble of having to write that in the future Oscar's helpfully wikied the instructions. (I also linked to it from our MS Office compatibility article.)

Smokey

[ovvldc]

And then Smokey was kind enough to make it look like an actual wiki article .

[sardisson]