Open Office 2.0.4 problems

My son has been using Oo 2.0.4 on his new Intel imac but today Oo refused to open. I have read that Apple released an update to X11 which has caused this problem, which remains unresolved at present.

As my son is doing a degree course he has to get on with his work, so he's removed Oo 2.0.4 and downloaded Neo Office (older version) which is working OK. The problem is he has a number of documents created in Oo 2.0.4 which will not now open. He's emailed them to me to see if I can open them on a windows PC - I can't. They have file extensions .cwk.

Can anyone please suggest how these files can be opened/saved in another format that can be opened by other word processing software?

thanks.

.cwk is the file extension for AppleWorks and FileMaker. Are you sure they're OpenOffice documents?

If you grab the latest beta of NeoOffice then it's very stable and should open OpenOffice.org 2 documents just fine.

I have tried OOo 2.0.4 and sure enough it won't start up. There is a temporary fix detailed here: http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/news/news2006.html#20061105

I was an avid Ooo fan until I had real problems with X11, which about 6 months ago went end up on me, nothing would fix it except some serious code hand-holding help that I could never have handled on my own.

Since then I changed over to NeoOffice which doesn't need X11 to run and as cazabam stated ^^supports all the Ooo files that one might have on their HardDrive.

I still use Ooo on my PC, it runs fine there but on my iMac it's NeoOffice for me.

Thanks to both of you for the replies.

He definitely created these files using Oo 2.0.4 and they now have file extensions of .cwk I have a trial version of Filemaker Pro 8.5 on a PC magazine CD, so I tried that but it doesn't recognize .cwk files!

Also Neo Office won't open these files either. I was hoping that I could find a way to open these files, convert them to MS Word then email them back to my son, as Neo Office would be able to open Word docs.

PS. I had located the 'fix' for Oo but when my son tried to type in his password, it wouldn't type anything. That's another mystery as his imac is new and has only been set up with him as a user, so I presume that when he logs on it will recognise him as an Administrator?

If you are using sudo at the Terminal then it doesn't show anything when you type your password. Just type it and press enter; trust me, it's there

When you are an administrator, it's not like Windows when you are an admin ALL THE TIME, no matter what you are doing. It simply means that you are able to gain admin privileges as and when they are required. Non-administrator users can never gain admin privileges.

I checked, and .cwk is definitely AppleWorks (I remembered the extension from when I was a ClarisWorks user). Maybe when he was saving he accidentally selected a different file type from the dropdown box in the save dialog?

cazabam

thanks again. I'll get him to try the 'fix' again but he'll have to download Oo 2.0.4 again to try that. Will it download now he's deleted it and installed Neo Office?

I'm confident he didn't save the files wrongly as he'd been re-opening them and working on them until Oo failed. It would appear that, when he deleted Oo, those saved documents changed. Do you think that re-installing Oo 2.0.4 will change them back again?

It will download and install fine - i have NeoOffice and OOo living quite happily alongside each other. I'm not entirely sure how the files got into that state; they're clearly not OOo documents. If reinstalling OOo doesn't fix them, I'd be happy to have a look at them for you. You can PM me if you want me to try and salvage them?

Addendum: There is this bit of shareware here:

http://www.topshareware.com/icWord-download-8569.htm

That lets you convert .cwk files. Might be worth downloading to see if it can do anything with it?

Griffo said:

cazabam

thanks again. I'll get him to try the 'fix' again but he'll have to download Oo 2.0.4 again to try that. Will it download now he's deleted it and installed Neo Office?

I'm confident he didn't save the files wrongly as he'd been re-opening them and working on them until Oo failed. It would appear that, when he deleted Oo, those saved documents changed. Do you think that re-installing Oo 2.0.4 will change them back again?

Click to expand...

Just delete NeoOffice as I don't think it's compatible with your Intel Mac at the moment until they release an Intel version.

You wouldn't have AppleWorks installed either so my advice is just redownload Oo.o, install it and we'll take it from there.

The file extension for Oo.o documents is .odt and I would try replacing the extension with this once Oo.o is installed.

Just ensure that the Intel version is downloaded and not the PPC version.

Pulse-8 said:

Just delete NeoOffice as I don't think it's compatible with your Intel Mac at the moment until they release an Intel version.

Click to expand...

The latest beta is Intel compatible, and is, coincidentally, the only version that can open .odt files.

cazabam said:

The latest beta is Intel compatible, and is, coincidentally, the only version that can open .odt files.

Click to expand...

I knew they were working on a release for Intels but I didn't know there was a download available...great! I just got my Core 2 Duo and I'll download it toute suite!

Here is the link:

http://www.planamesa.com/neojava/en/mirrors.php?file=NeoOffice-2.0_Aqua_Beta_3-Intel.dmg

cazabam said:

Addendum: There is this bit of shareware here:

http://www.topshareware.com/icWord-download-8569.htm

That lets you convert .cwk files. Might be worth downloading to see if it can do anything with it?

Click to expand...

I've tried downloading this to my Windows XP laptop (where I have saved copies of the .cwk files) and needed to also download 'Stuffit expander' to try to open it but canot get icWord 3.0 to run, it just keeps putting another icon on the desktop every time I click 'continue'.

I also tried downloading onto the imac G4 (which is still running for the moment!) and when I try to open the download on there, it says:-

'there is no default application specified to open the document 'icWord Installer folder.sit' and asks me to select an application to use - lost here!!

I fear I've misinformed you about the origins of these .cwk files. I thought my son was using Oo when he created them - apparently not. It was some free word processing program that we dowloaded but can't remember what.

He's quite happy using Neo Office on his new Intel imac, so that's fine by me as long as we can somehow salvage the .cwk files.

Any suggestions on what I can do to get icWord 3.0 working please?

Got icWord to work and have managed to open the .cwk files. I've saved them as .odt files in Neo Office (on G4) and emailed them to my son to see if he can open them on his intel imac, which is also running Neo Office.

One remaining worry is that I cannot open these .odt files on my laptop (Win. XP with MS Word 2003). I thought that Neo Office documents were compatible with MS Word??

Just wanted to say many thanks to you folks for your help. We've managed to retrieve the work and my son is very relieved!

Thanks a lot.

Griffo said:

One remaining worry is that I cannot open these .odt files on my laptop (Win. XP with MS Word 2003). I thought that Neo Office documents were compatible with MS Word??

Click to expand...

Unfortunately, although NeoOffice (and Openoffice) can open Word documents, Microsoft is sulking in the corner and refusing to support OpenDocument format that NeoOffice/OpenOffice uses. Fortunately, OpenOffice for windows works great

I take it this is a one-way street then, Oo (Neo) will open MS Word docs but MS Word won't open Oo (Neo) docs, when one is a Mac, right? As you say, this isn't the case when using two Windows machines.

If that is the case, we probably need to find software that works on both as we're a mixed PC family and need to interchange documents. Any (cheap) suggestions please?

Griffo said:

I take it this is a one-way street then, Oo (Neo) will open MS Word docs but MS Word won't open Oo (Neo) docs, when one is a Mac, right? As you say, this isn't the case when using two Windows machines.

Click to expand...

Word won't open OpenOffice/NeoOffice documents on any platform. It's a one way street in that OO/Neo can open just about anything, but Word is rubbish and can only open Word docs.

If that is the case, we probably need to find software that works on both as we're a mixed PC family and need to interchange documents. Any (cheap) suggestions please?

Click to expand...

My suggestion is OpenOffice. It works fine on Windows, Linux, OS X, BSD etc and opens Word and ODT files just fine. And it's free, of course.

Sorry if I'm being thick but you say Word won't open Oo or Neo docs., which is what we're finding but then you say we should use Oo?? Am I missing something here? Surely, we still have the problem that, docs. created on one of our macs using Neo or Oo wouldn't be able to send those docs. to our Windows PC's and then allow us to open them in Word?

Griffo said:

Sorry if I'm being thick but you say Word won't open Oo or Neo docs., which is what we're finding but then you say we should use Oo?? Am I missing something here? Surely, we still have the problem that, docs. created on one of our macs using Neo or Oo wouldn't be able to send those docs. to our Windows PC's and then allow us to open them in Word?

Click to expand...

If the docs are straight text then save them in the Rich Text Format (RTF) then any word processing program can view them on any platform.

If the docs have images and logos and other such things then you won't be able to save them as RTF's as this format is straight text document with no fancy frills.

You could also save the doc as a PDF file (both Neo and Oo.o export to PDF)and a PC could view them with all the formatting you can throw at them totally intact. All the PC would need is Adobe Acrobat PDF Reader, which is a free download.