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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
The fact is - ODF was already an ISO standar before Microsoft started ramming it through Ecma and later ISO largely by stuffing the ballots with Microsoft paid shills. My advice would be NOT to use OOXML because it is an unnecessary standard that has been encumbered with a lot of proprietary binary blobs.
If someone does not want himself bound to for-pay software from a company that can't be honest enough to admit they don't want to support other peoples standards I would advise him to prefer .ODT for text documents and to not use word processors that do not support it.
LibreOffice fork of OpenOffice (the only fork I ever suggest to anyone) opens and saves in both .odt and OOXML file formats. It's quite flexible. No one is tied to any particular file format unless compatibility with other users is important. Some people prefer one of the many Rich Text File formats (.rtf). Others would rather share using Portable Document Format (.pdf).
No one has to pay to use OOXML. It is an open standard, plain text, and is not proprietary.
Mac users who use Microsoft Office are not left out of opening .odt files, but it has to be done in OneDrive rather than the desktop version of Microsoft Office for Mac.
LibreOffice has no problem with OOXML files, so anyone using LibreOffice will find they can open, edit, and save in either .odt or OOXML formats. However, just because LibreOffice can open OOXML files, that doesn't mean LibreOffice has the same feature set as Microsoft Office.
Wikipediaprovides a more detailed understanding of this .odt format.
Your assertion that ODF support was removed from Microsoft Office is false.
As I already stated, although ODF is an open file format that is backed by an open standard, the ODF format was replaced by OOXML. There's not much point in adding support for older technologies when the world has by and large adopted its replacement.
This is nonsense, and a very weaselly use of the passive to avoid saying who did what. ODF was adopted as a standard. MS dropped it in favour of OOXML, which was accepted as an international standard amidst much controversy. The ODF standard was never dropped by anyone other than MS, and development on ODF continues.