Yong Bong Fong had a problem he posted to the list on 07 June 2005

Dear all,

I have a problem with some of my openoffice files. When I tried to open it it comes out with a box title "Filter selection". I clicked on the format type and nothing open. This happened in many of the computers here and they didn't have such a problem initially when they first started to use it. Its after a while then we have such problem,

Anyone knows what is the problem? Any way to recover the file that cannot be opened? Please help me.........

Thanks a lot for taking time reading my mail,

One of the beauties of the OpenDocument format is that it is just a compressed XML file. So, in essence you can open the .sxw or .odt file in a program like 7-Zip. Let's look at an example.

Let's say this is my OOo Writer document:


Now, I can open this file in a program like 7-Zip or WinZip and extract the files to a directory. There should be five files:

• settings.xml
• meta.xml
• styles.xml
• content.xml
• mimetype

And a folder called META-INF.

Now, you can open the file content.xml in any text editor. I choose notepad. It will look something like this:


This can be a bit overwhelming, but if you look at the end of the document, you can see your content. In this next picture, it is highlighted:


You can then copy your text over into a new document.

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Last Edited 09 June 2005