Tip - Old Star Office Files

[bhobjj]

I was trying to access some of my old Openoffice files created before 2001 (1998,1999, 2000). These were in Star Office format. I could not open the files with Openoffice 2.x.

It was necessary to install an import filter. The Debian package is called
"openoffice.org-filter-binfilter" Legacy filters (e.g. StarOffice 5.2) for OpenOffice.org.

Info on Deb packages here:
http://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=openoffice.org-filter-binfilter&searchon=names&suite=all&section=all

or try:
$ apt-cache search openoffice | grep filters

For long term archive purposes, it is prudent to save copies in plain ascii text (eg: spreadsheet files as csv, docs as txt).

-BoB

[bhobjj]

On a related note,
I found this project Ooopy:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ooopy/


Ooopy is a series of python scripts for manipulating Openoffice files including:
ooo_cat for concatenating several OOo files into one
ooo_fieldreplace for replacing fields in an OOo document
ooo_mailmerge for doing a mailmerge from a template OOo document and a CSV (comma separated values) input
ooo_as_text for getting the text from an OOo-File (e.g., for doing a "grep" on the output).


Although it is still an alpha project, the scripts have been working well for me.


-BoB