On several occasions I have writer documents with embedded calc worksheets that, without obvious reasons, can no longer be edited after being reopened even though previously editable. The calc worksheets appear as an object, can be selected but cannot be opened. This appears to be document specific as other similar writer files with embedded cal worksheets still allow opening of those worksheets. Any way to recover these objects in a calc editable form? or to prevent this from happening? This has occurred in multiple LO writer versions including current 7.2.7.2
MacOS Mojave
Was that really embedded or was it a linked document that’s now gone and only the preview survived?
I believe it was embedded but I am unclear on how to determine whether an object is linked or embedded. Are there metadata attached to the writer file to let me see that? An earlier version of the writer file has the an earlier version of the calc spreadsheet in editable form.
Linked files (created with Insert → OLE Object → OLE Object, Create from file, Link to file checked) would have an entry under Edit → External Links…, but I just saw that apparently there is a bug that such linked object is not loaded again by Writer (works in Calc) at all :-( not even with a place holder. So that can’t be the reason.
Can you upload an ODF type sample file here?
Sorry but the file type is ODT?
To follow up on linking versus embedding, the files that have editable calc spreadsheets do not have a a link. In the menu “Edit” , “links to external files” is greyed out.
ODF: Open Document Format (International Standard)
.odt : the filename extension for the Writer documents
.ods: the filename extension for the Calc documents
Attached is a file that previously had editable embedded calc spreadsheets
220712 inject Ca curve KCL.odt (37.1 KB)
Nothing much to say other than all objects have an ObjectReplacements/Object (i.e. the visible draw image view) but no actual object with content. References to <draw:object xlink:href="./Object 1" ... and so on exist, but not any present in the file’s archive. No clue why they are absent. Don’t know either whether LibreOffice/7.1.8.1$MacOSX_X86_64 had some bug regarding that or what might had gone wrong.
The only suggestion I can give is to restore the file from your last known good backup, if you are doing backups.
Thanks. I have a backup. I was hoping to understand how this could happen or how to prevent future losses. Searches of the web did not show others with the problem. I was surprised since this has happened multiple times with other documents. Can you point me toward a page with info on how to to see the file metadata such as the archive you mention?
ODF documents are zip containers with xml files, you can unzip a document into a temporary directory (or from an archive viewer) and inspect the structure and XML content in an XML viewer, or prettified in any editor. However that’s doable on macOS, don’t ask me :)