NWE Help: StarOffice: Saving

Saving with StarOffice is simple, but you do need to know where you want to save your file and in what format you want the file saved. Select save as from the file menu and the save dialog box below pops up.

By default, StarOffice saves into your home directory, which you can see in the top left where it has "/home/nwe/username". However, of you open the file from the web, then the file is opened in a temp directory and you have to switch to your home directory to save the file. To switch to your home directory, just click on the top right hand button in the save window. The button is a folder with what looks like a small blue hammer on it.

You can either save here or in your web space, which is in your public_html directory. If you wanted to save a file in your public_html directory, you would double click public_html in the top white section fo the dialog box. Then, the top left corner would change to show "home/nwe/username/public_html".

Saving a file with StarOffice

Save Format

The bottom of this dialog box gives you options for the format to save your documents. This option is extremely importnat because some programs have problems reading the formatting done by other programs. If you might work on your document from somewhere other than the NWE, then save the document as Rich Text Format (RTF). RTF documents can be read by a variety of programs and RTF looses very little formatting. Microsoft Word, WordPerfect, and StarOffice can all read and work with RTF. Just make sure to save the document as RTF when you work on it with another program.

StarOffice by default saves documents as StarOffice 6.0 Text documents.

StarOffice also includes slide show and spreadsheet applications. For these and the word processing applications, please note that other programs, like WordPerfect and Microsoft Word, may have difficulty reading files saved in the StarOffice formats. To make sure that your files will work in other programs, make sure to save your StarOffice documents in formats that will work in the other programs.

If you only plan to access your files in StarOffice, the default StarOffice options work best. If you think that there's any possibility that you may need to access your files using another program, save your files in multiple formats. For text documents, save in RTF for use with multiple programs or, for use in Microsoft Word, save in Microsoft Word format. For the slide show, save in Excel format for use in Microsoft Excel, or save as a comma separated file (Text CSV). Comma separated files simply separate each entry with a comma so that the data can be easily retrieved and the file sizes are small. Saving as a comma separated file will cause you to loose calculations you've added in, so use it only for data that doesn't involve computations. For the slide show, save the file in PowerPoint format to work in Microsoft PowerPoint.

Or, for the simplest solution, save your files with the standard StarOffice format and download StarOffice for your home computer. StarOffice is free for educational purposes so students and teachers can download StarOffice through Sun's website.