Microsoft Word documents
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| - | + | == Can [[AbiWord|AbiWord]] open Microsoft Word® documents? == | |
Presently, can open most Microsoft Word documents well. For further information and a few "quid pro quos", please continue reading. | Presently, can open most Microsoft Word documents well. For further information and a few "quid pro quos", please continue reading. | ||
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Some developers and even a few users have suggested that this is dishonest and ''cheating''. In fact this ''cheating'' is something Microsoft themselves have done in their own software! (Example: MS Wordpad on Windows 98 claims to save as Microsoft Word 6.0 (.doc) but if you look at the files in a text editor you can see that it is in fact Rich Text Format). | Some developers and even a few users have suggested that this is dishonest and ''cheating''. In fact this ''cheating'' is something Microsoft themselves have done in their own software! (Example: MS Wordpad on Windows 98 claims to save as Microsoft Word 6.0 (.doc) but if you look at the files in a text editor you can see that it is in fact Rich Text Format). | ||
There are no plans to support binary MS Word export. | There are no plans to support binary MS Word export. | ||
| - | See | + | See [http://www.abisource.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=2565 Bug 2565] |
| - | http://www.abisource.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=2565 | + | |
=== The "Save As" Problem === | === The "Save As" Problem === | ||
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(please feel free to edit this or perhaps split the Save As Problem into another section). | (please feel free to edit this or perhaps split the Save As Problem into another section). | ||
| - | [[Category: | + | [[Category:FAQ]] |
Revision as of 00:45, 10 April 2008
Contents |
Can AbiWord open Microsoft Word® documents?
Presently, can open most Microsoft Word documents well. For further information and a few "quid pro quos", please continue reading.
Caveat
However, if the document has complicated tables, text boxes, embedded spreadsheets, and so forth, then it might not work as expected. Developing good MS Word filters is a very difficult process, so please bear with us as we work on getting Word documents to open correctly. If you have a Word document which fails to load, please open a Bug and include the document so we can improve the importer.
Saving as .doc
can currently save in an MS Word compatible ".doc" format. This is done by saving as Rich Text Format (.rtf) but with a .doc extension. The file extension does not mean that the file is a binary Microsoft Word document and .doc may contain RTF, HTML or plain text. This is a feature — Microsoft themselves have used .doc to exploit a mis-feature of MS-Word.
Some developers and even a few users have suggested that this is dishonest and cheating. In fact this cheating is something Microsoft themselves have done in their own software! (Example: MS Wordpad on Windows 98 claims to save as Microsoft Word 6.0 (.doc) but if you look at the files in a text editor you can see that it is in fact Rich Text Format). There are no plans to support binary MS Word export. See Bug 2565
The "Save As" Problem
There is only one downside of this approach and many users have wondered why when they try to Save a Microsoft word document they get prompted to Save As instead. This is because of the small possibility of losing some of the information contained in the original file and the last thing we want is for users to lose data so we must make sure that users do not accidentally overwrite the original and they must choose do so deliberately. (please feel free to edit this or perhaps split the Save As Problem into another section).
