I never use Draw but can’t keep previously saved Writer documents from opening in Draw. How do I force my saved Writer documents to open in Writer and not Draw.
I never have used Draw and never want to!
LO does not rely on file extension to hand over documents to components (Writer, Draw, …). It reads a portion of the file to guess real contents. So, either your document was not correctly saved or it is a PDF document. Writer does not handle PDFs. LO considers them as graphical files and hand them over to Draw so that you can play with the various boxes.
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VERY Helpful response, ajlittoz – will give me something to work on. Thanks!
Do we have any more information here. My office libre text document file is now suddenly opening in Draw instead of Writer. I never saved it in Draw. I did save it as a .pdf. The .odt file is still there, but not it opens in draw instead of Writer. I tried opening Writer then opening the document from inside Writer but it still isn’t working. I have lost 6 hours of work on this 52 page document if I can’t open it in Writer.
Create a screencast of the process starting from your file manager. Make sure that the file extensions are shown in the manager.
You may have overwritten your .odt with the PDF export. LO does not use file extension to open documents. It samples a bit of it and, according to its findings, launches the appropriate component. Therefore, if it finds a PDF signature, the document is handed over to Draw, no matter the file extension.
Assuming no backup and your file being a pdf, wich was saved with wrong extension: Copy/Rename to xx.pdf and open the file in a pdf-reader. Mark the text, copy and paste to a new Writer file.
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Restore your formatting. Tables and images may need additional work.
Learn something of this about value and frequency of backups.
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That’s incredibly rude. Lovely customer service attitude. If only Office Libre did the automatic back-ups like Word that I could access.
This makes sense because the file size changed.
This site is in no way a LO-funded customer service. It is a user-to-user Question & Answers site where “ordinary users” share their experience. No official LO or TDF commitment, only recipes discovered when we experienced similar issues.
Did you by any chance save it as a PDF whilst including the contents of the Writer document ? To you, it would seem like you created a Writer file when in reality , it is a PDF file. Unfortunately, the default behaviour for opening PDF files in LO is through Draw. That said, through File>Open, you can choose to load PDFs in Writer (scroll down the list of document types that Writer can handle and choose PDF).
See Preventing data disaster - The Document Foundation Wiki and the lnked page What is the option Backup copy for and how do I recover a document?
It needs an initial save however, just like Word (Office 365 is different, it saves even when you don’t want it to).
You could also look at this extension, https://extensions.libreoffice.org/en/extensions/show/timestamp-backup
Thank you, that is very helpful information. I have clicked the make backup on close button, but could never find where the back-ups were. So, I have been saving the file under a new name every day. But, only once a day, not once an hour as Wanderer seems to think we should. I will definitely try the extension.
The location for backup files can be seen, and changed, via Tools | Options | LibreOffice | Paths. On a Mac, use LibreOffice | Preferences instead of Tools | Options