Family Historian User Group

Hi,

I used Libre Office for over 200 documents on my Laptop with FH V7. I now have a new PC and have installed MS Word as my standard document format. Both PC & Laptop are Windows 11. Is there a way to convert & save all these .odt documents to Word so that FH will open the MS Word version rather than the .odt version? When I open a Libre Office Writer document in FH, MS Word gives me all sort of warnings & then if I save the document in MS Word format, I find that
next time FH opens the document it then reverts back to the .odt version of the file again.

If I simply save an .odt as a MS Word equivalent in the "All Media" file, FH will only open the .odt version not the MS Word version. So far all I can think of is deleting each .odt file & then adding the MS Word version of that file for FH to then include it in the individual's record. With over 200, that will take a long time!

When Word opens the odt file and gives you "all sorts of warnings" - what are those warnings and are there any 'dont show these warnings again' options to tick on the message? Word should be able to open odt files and display them quite happily.

I was going to suggest that after saving the .odt files as .docx files you could use Find and Replace to change .odt to .docx throughout the gedom file. However, although Edit > Find correctly finds .odt (searching in 'other fields') Edit > Find and Replace doesn't make any changes! I don't know why but I'm sure someone will come up with an explanation.

Hi Joe.
When you convert the .odt file to MS Word format the file type becomes .docx but the FH Media record File link is still referring to the .odt file and needs to be changed to refer to the .docx file.

So every Media record File link field needs its .odt to be replaced with the .docx file type.
Also, the Format field needs to be similarly replaced.
Do you agree?

The Edit > Find... command finds those .odt entries but unfortunately Edit > Find and Replace... does not!
Perhaps that is a fault and needs reporting to CP?

Before anything else, you must create the .docx versions of those 200+ files.
Otherwise, the following process won't work correctly.

Then you will need to use the Search and Replace plugin.
Set its Search Scope to Multimedia Records (OBJE)
The Basic Filters are not selective enough so open the Extra Filters tab.
Tick only the Multimedia Format & Place Hierarchy Fields and Multimedia Linked File fields & Media files
Back on the Major Options tab set Search: to odt and Replace: to docx
Now click the Search & Replace button and if the replacemembt looks OK click Replace
After checking a few, untick Confirm every item found and Replace the rest.

After closing the plugin it will list all the changes in a Result Set.
Check the new MS Word files are opened by FH.
If anything is unsatisfactory, use Edit > Undo Plugin Chnages before closing FH.

Thank you all for your replies. I will do the search & replace & will post the results here on the Forum, in case anyone else finds they need to change document formats in the future.

Microsoft Word can use the odt format so why bother converting them?

Re: New PC MS Word & Libre Office Problems
Unread post by NickWalker » 05 Mar 2022 21:40

Microsoft Word can use the odt format so why bother converting them?

Hi Nick, you are right that MS Word can read .odt formatted files - but on opening such a file I get the message "The file XXXX cannot be opened because there are problems with the contents." Then on clicking "OK", I get the message " Word found unreliable content in the file XXXX. Do you want to recover the contents of this document? If you trust the source of this document , click Yes". If I click Yes, then on closing the document (even without making any changes at all) I get the message "Do you want to make changes to the document?" If I were to have made any changes & wanted to save them, then MS Word gives the document the default filename of the first word in the document & a path which is not in the FH Media Library. If I were to then put the MS Word document in the FH Media Library (with the correct filename), then next time I open the XXXX file from FH it still opens the original .odt file not the amended MS Word document. Hence I can't use MS Word with the .odt files!

Ah OK you hadn't said the files were corrupted. If Word is able to recover them you could then use Save As to save them as odt files with the same name you had before.

AFAIK the only way to prevent .odt files from automatically launching LibreOffice (or whatever application is currently the default), would be to change the 'Default Apps' settings in Windows to set MS Word as the default app for .odt , but that preference would then, of course, be universally applied to all .odt files, not just those linked from Family Historian. There is no way I know of to define a selective Default, although, in the Windows file manager, the Right Click > Open with... option will still allow an application choice to be made.

One caveat is that, from review comments I have previously seen, MS probably hasn't put as much effort into its management of 'competitor' open document formats as its competitors have with their implementation of .docx compatibility.

Mervyn

mjashby wrote: ↑

06 Mar 2022 01:30

AFAIK the only way to prevent .odt files from automatically launching LibreOffice (or whatever application is currently the default), would be to change the 'Default Apps' settings in Windows to set MS Word as the default app for .odt , but that preference would then, of course, be universally applied to all .odt files, not just those linked from Family Historian. There is no way I know of to define a selective Default, although, in the Windows file manager, the Right Click > Open with... option will still allow an application choice to be made.

One caveat is that, from review comments I have previously seen, MS probably hasn't put as much effort into its management of 'competitor' open document formats as its competitors have with their implementation of .docx compatibility.

Mervyn

When you first install Word it asks if you want to use docx or odt as the default file format. Microsoft certainly encourage you to use docx but odt does work OK, particularly if you're not using advanced features of Word. I know a lot of users choose odt as their default format, usually because they're confused by the choice they're given when they first run Word. If Word is installed it is likely to be the default viewer/editor for odt so my line of questioning was around the necessity to convert them in the first place but it sounds as if there is something about the format of these particular odt files that Word doesn't like so it assumes they are corrupted. If they're converted into docx then the file paths also need to updated in Family Historian for each image (as Mike describes). If they are saved again as odt files to the same location and with the same name then they would just work in Family Historian without needing to update the project.

Hi - it worked! I have managed to convert all my LibreOffice files to Microsoft Word / Excel on my new PC. With grateful thanks to all - particularly Mike Tate whose plugin worked well. The only point I would make is that the most tedious & longest part of the whole process was making copies of all the .odt files to .docx equivalents. I couldn't think of an automatic way & ended up opening each file & then saving it as a Word document.

Free convert:
https://www.freeconvert.com/odt-to-docx
claims to do this online en mass, upto a gigabyte worth for free, any more as a paid option. Not tried it, but saw it a few months back. Mybe it has a hideous watermark, who knows?