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I'm using Office for Mac 2008, version 12.3.5. I've received a .odt (Open Office) file on an email but cannot open it. I did get a message that the file may be corrupt or contain unreadable elements. Is there anything I can download to read it assuming that it just hasn't been recognised or should Word read it & therefore it must be corrupt?
Thanks
Janet
A family of Microsoft word processing software products for creating web, email, and print documents.
Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.
Word Online defaults to docx format, not odt. Odt is an optional save format in that version. Here is Microsoft's page on which features are supported: Differences between the OpenDocument Text (.odt) format and the Word (.docx) format used by Word Online
ODT is an old format that was replaced by Office Open XML (OOXML). Microsoft switched to OOXML as the default format beginning with office 2007. Apple supports OOXML with TextEdit and has partial support for the current standard in Pages. OpenOffice offers partial support for OOXML, with the latest LibreOffice fork of OpenOffice offering both read and write support for OOXML. No fork of OpenOffice has switched to the current OOXML standard as its default file format.
Microsoft supports ODT in Office for Windows. That was a result of the timing of the new standard. Years ago Microsoft had been under fire for not supporting open file formats. So Microsoft built in support for ODT expecting ODT to be adopted as the open file standard. The standards body picked a better open format OOXML. The development cycle of Office 2008 for Mac was just beginning so Microsoft skipped ODT support in Office for Mac and went forward with the new standard - OOXML - as supporting a newly discontinued standard seemed kinda dumb,
People resist change. There are billions of files in old prioprietary Office formats as well as ODT that people have yet to convert to OOXML. So far, these old formats are hanging on, much as RTF in its various incantations hangs around.
I stand by my advice to stick with the current standard, which is OOXML. Files saved in OOXML can be opened and used by every word processor I can think of. Compatibility problems are minimized.
I don't agree with your advice that the ODT format should not be used any more. ODT is a format that is well supported by Open Office and Libre Office and works very well in my experience. It is unfortunate that Microsoft chooses not to support it, but that isn't a reason not to use it.
Word for Windows can open .odt files. Microsoft had committed to supporting open file formats. As the timing worked out, the newer standard was approved by the standards body before Microsoft started to work on open file formats on the Mac. There was no reason to support the newly replaced .odt format on the Mac because the new standard went into effect. On the PC side Microsoft wound up doing double the work. They got all done building support for .odt and then had to do support for Office Open XML, too. Since they had all the work done, they kept support for .odt on the PC side.
Many thanks for the detailed reply. I'll pass on the advice so that my friend can make the file readable. Oddly she usually uses Word 2010 with Windows 7, so I can't imagine where this file originated or how she managed to read it herself.