Open Office Technology

OpenOffice supports a number of document formats, including the OpenDocument, Microsoft Office, StarOffice, HTML, RTF and text formats. Some formats can be both written and read, while some can only be written and some can only be read. The formats that can be read appear in the file chooser dialog when opening a document using the menu File | Open. The formats that can be written and read appear in the file chooser dialog when saving a document using the menu File | Save As. The formats that can only be written and not read appear in the file chooser dialog when exporting a document using the menu File | Export.

The various formats can be hidden or disabled as follows:

Under org.openoffice.TypeDetection.Filter/Filters, find the format you wish to hide or remove. The formats are named using their internal names, however, the internal names can be associated with their common names (the name that appears in the file dialogs) by examining the default values of the settings under the format's UIName.

After locating the format, open the Flags property, set it to Enabled, then:

- To hide the format in the File Open and Save As dialogs, add the flags NOTINFILEDIALOG and NOTINCHOOSER to the normal value (see below). Note: it is not possible to hide a format in only one of these two dialogs, Open or Save As. Setting these flags hides the format in both places.

- To disable the ability to write the format, remove the EXPORT flag from the normal value (see below). This will also remove the format from the File | Save As or File | Export dialog. If the format can still be read, then existing documents in this format can be opened, but the File | Save option will be disabled and the user will only be able to save in a different format using Save As or Export.

- To disable the ability to read the format, remove the IMPORT flag from the normal value (see below). This will also remove the format from the File | Open dialog. If the format can still be written and it is not hidden, it will appear in the File | Export dialog instead of the File | Save As dialog.

- To disable the format completely, leave the flags' Value blank.

A flag can be added or removed from the normal value as follows: Navigate to the Explain tab, highlight and copy the normal value, navigate to the Setting tab, paste into the Value field, then edit the Value to add or remove flags, including the # delimiters.

For example, to remove Microsoft Word 6.0 as a file save option:

In org.openoffice.TypeDetection.Filter/Filters/Filter['MS WinWord 6.0']
copy the normal value for Flags and then remove the EXPORT flag

Also note if the format being hidden or disabled is currently set to the default format, the default format must first be changed. See Default File Formats.