Readind Word files (.doc) on X11 and Open Office

I have just downloaded and installed X11 1.13 and Open Office 2.04 on my machine. I thought I was doing fine. I opened and edited some RTF files (originally made on the Mac app 'Text Edit') in Open Office (OO) without any problems. But when I open some Microsoft (.doc) files the formattimg is seriously messed up. I first get several pages of gibberish - which I assume is some MS document Header information and formatting that isn't translatable into OO. But then in the text itself I also have several problems, such as:

1.) a dash '-' is represented by '©©';
2.) words occasionally start with 'ê' for no apparant reason, examples: êcase + êbe + êexplain instead of case or be or explain. Also note that these words do NOT always have the 'ê' so they usually appear correctly;
3.) the ' itself appears as ¿##¿, thus the word isn't appears as isn¿##¿t;
4.) and quotes " appears as (first) ?#? then ƒ#ƒ, thus "us" appears as ?#?usƒ#ƒ;

I am sure there are others but that is what stands out at first glance. Has anyone seen this? Does anyone know how to fix this? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated! Thank you,

Joe

PS I am on an Intel OS X 10.4.8 Imac. I loaded X11 and Open Office because I do NOT want to buy Microsoft Office.

MS Office docs annoy me like this too. I don't know how to get it exactly right using OO.o. However, have you tried to upload the document to Google Doc? If that succeeds, you will be able to export to PDF at least, or maybe even ODT, which OO.o will definitely be able to read. Worth a try maybe.

Yes, that is one possibility. I already belong to Writely but would rather work on my local computer in most cases. Interestingly, Writely could not open the MS Office Doc in question but could open several others. Perhaps the file in question is corrupt? Or OO.o corrupted it? It is also annoying that Writely still won't work with Safari; but I have Firefox so that isn't too much of a problem. Thanks for the reply,

Joe

PS I think I am going to make copies of the files that opened on Writely and see if they open in OO.o. Sigh. I hope this is a false alarm.

This is sort of tangential, but if you're using OS X, you might want to try NeoOffice, which is a much better looking, mac-like version of OpenOffice (also free, of course).

http://www.neooffice.org

Give it a go.

Thanks for the info but if I do not get another instance of this problem (corrupt .doc in Open Office) I will probably stick with OO. The .doc files that opened in Writely opened also in OO, so I will do more experimentation this weekend and if I don't find more problems I will happily leave well enough alone.

Thanks for your time,

Joe

I use Pages and only occasionally see some format changes if it is a very richly formatted document.