Converting from Open Office to Word

David had computer repairs done after a system crash and the repair people installed Open Office instead of Microsoft Office. He used it for a while and his existing Word files opened in Open Office, but when he then saved them they were in ODT format, which is used by Open Office. David later decided to purchase and install Office 2007. Now all his converted files (in ODT format) refuse to open in Word, and David wonders how to get the files into Word 2007.

There are several things you can do. The first and undoubtedly the most labor-intensive method is to make sure that you still have Open Office installed on your system, open each file, and use Save As to save each in either Word or RTF format.

There is an easier way, however. You could make sure that you have Service Pack 2 for Office 2007 installed on your system, and then you should be able to open the ODT files just fine. You will still, of course, need to use Save As on each of them to save them in Word's native format. The information about the service pack can be found here:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word/HA102816191033.aspx

If you don't want to install the service pack for some reason, and if you have at least Service Pack 1 installed, you can use Sun's ODF plug-in. You can find it here:

http://www.sun.com/software/star/odf_plugin/

Another option is to use a specialized document conversion program or service. There are many on the market; a quick search for "document conversion" should turn up several promising candidates. There is a free online service you can use to do the conversions, here:

http://media-convert.com

This service will allow you to convert ODT files to DOC files (it won't handle conversion to Word 2007 files yet).