[Landrover]

I have a Toshiba Satellite l455D-S5976, running windows 7 home premium 32-bit. I have openoffice installed on it and use it as my word processing program. I found it much better than microsoft word and much more useful. It has worked great since I got my laptop 2 years ago. But the other day I went to access a document that I had saved earlier in the day and I couldn't because instead of being an ODF file it was as just a file. I couldn't access the documet at all, I then wrote document again and the same thing happened. I have no idea how this happened but every time I go to save a new file, the exact samething happened. I made sure when I saved the document that it said ODF in the box below the file name before I saved it, but this made no difference. Does anyone know how I can fix this problem and also how to retrieve the files that I can't access. Any help would be greatly appriciated.

[LiveBrianD]

Landrover, on 01 December 2011 - 05:48 PM, said:

I have a Toshiba Satellite l455D-S5976, running windows 7 home premium 32-bit. I have openoffice installed on it and use it as my word processing program. I found it much better than microsoft word and much more useful. It has worked great since I got my laptop 2 years ago. But the other day I went to access a document that I had saved earlier in the day and I couldn't because instead of being an ODF file it was as just a file. I couldn't access the documet at all, I then wrote document again and the same thing happened. I have no idea how this happened but every time I go to save a new file, the exact samething happened. I made sure when I saved the document that it said ODF in the box below the file name before I saved it, but this made no difference. Does anyone know how I can fix this problem and also how to retrieve the files that I can't access. Any help would be greatly appriciated.

So the file doesn't have ANY file extension? Open the command prompt and go to the folder where the files are (remember? cd a folder's name, cd .. to go back a directory, cd \ to get to the root, dir to see a list of the files there), and look and see if it has one. Rename the extension by doing this:
ren "thefilename and btw you must use double quotes if the file's name has spaces in it or else it'll think those are other syntaxes of the command which of course aren't valid and won't work.txt" "the new name which is much sorter than the old one well sorta jk not really.odt"

Try right-clicking the file, open-with, and selecting open office. You may need to change the default program.

[Landrover]

I can now open the files, I did this by choosing openoffice as the program to open the files with. Thank you for the help on that LiveBrianD. But I still can't figure out how to change the format of the file. I tried to save the file in a microsoft word format but the same thing happened. Every time I go to save a new file, no matter what format I have set, it just gets saved as a simple "File" not ODF nor any other file. I have no idea how that happened or how to fix it.

[LiveBrianD]

What happens if you save a file as "whatever name you want.odt"? WITH double-quotes? And do you know if there is an extension on those files AT ALL? (Note: you may need to go into Windows Explorer's view options to show file extensions for known files.)

[AlexanderParsan]

Landrover, on 01 December 2011 - 05:48 PM, said:

I have a Toshiba Satellite l455D-S5976, running windows 7 home premium 32-bit. I have openoffice installed on it and use it as my word processing program. I found it much better than microsoft word and much more useful. It has worked great since I got my laptop 2 years ago. But the other day I went to access a document that I had saved earlier in the day and I couldn't because instead of being an ODF file it was as just a file. I couldn't access the documet at all, I then wrote document again and the same thing happened. I have no idea how this happened but every time I go to save a new file, the exact samething happened. I made sure when I saved the document that it said ODF in the box below the file name before I saved it, but this made no difference. Does anyone know how I can fix this problem and also how to retrieve the files that I can't access. Any help would be greatly appriciated.

What type of file is it?

[Evildave]

The Windoze GUI will 'hide' extensions of known file types, by default. You can track down that setting in the Explorer menus somewhere, and have it always show file extensions. Then you can change the file extension in an explorer window.

If you give it a '.zip' extension, you can unpack the file and see all the bits of it as XML, too. That will let you know what file type it is. The 'mimetype' file should tell you what you need to know.

[Landrover]

Sorry I think I used the wrong terminology, its not a file but the actual text documents that I composed in Openoffice. When I saved the document instead of being saved in ODT format it got saved in a "File" format, just plan file nothing else. I can still open the document with openoffice and edit it just the same but it still shows up as "File" in the document list not "Open document text" like all the others.

[Evildave]

The same 'explorer' settings I mentioned can be used to rename file extensions and re-associate applications. Though you can probably just re-install openoffice.org (or libre office) to 'fix' the association.