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Configuring OpenOffice.org to save in Microsoft Office formats by default

_{Posted Wed, Jan 21,
2009}

When I took my current job, I inherited a complete mess. Every computer was set up in a completely ad-hoc manner, and the software is nowhere close to standardized. This creates awesome little brain-teasers for me, like the incompatibility of Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express (although, really, I'm more upset at MS about this one; email clients shouldn't have to be standardized at all, because email is supposed to be) Anyway, part of my clean-up initiative is mandating what software gets put on new systems. I decided paying upwards of $200 for a copy of Microsoft Office, chock-full of its own incompatibilities and awful errors, was downright foolish. I'm also a fan of FOSS software, so I decided to give OpenOffice.org a shot in the business environment. The results were pretty good; most of my users couldn't even tell the difference! The only problem they reported was that OO was saving files in OpenDocument format by default, which is obviously a problem for the Microsoft-centric business world. You can change this in the program itself in the options, but doing this on all the computers I install it on is too tall an order. After a little research and poking around, I found the file that contains this setting, and wrapped up a juiced version of it with my OpenOffice installer, so that all instances will save in Word/Excel/PowerPoint by default. The file (Setup.xcu) lives deep in the hierarchy of folders, in OpenOffice.org 3\share\registry\data\org\openoffice. It's just an XML file that contains some settings that can be applied for the user. Mine looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<oor:component-data xmlns:oor="http://openoffice.org/2001/registry"
xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" oor:name="Setup"
oor:package="org.openoffice">
 <node oor:name="Office">
  <node oor:name="Factories">
   <node oor:name="com.sun.star.sheet.SpreadsheetDocument">
    <prop oor:name="ooSetupFactoryWindowAttributes" oor:type="xs:string">
     <value>92,146,952,520;4;0,0,0,0;</value>
    </prop>
    <prop oor:name="ooSetupFactoryDefaultFilter" oor:type="xs:string">
     <value>MS Excel 97</value>
    </prop>
   </node>
   <node oor:name="com.sun.star.presentation.PresentationDocument">
    <prop oor:name="ooSetupFactoryDefaultFilter" oor:type="xs:string">
     <value>MS PowerPoint 97</value>
    </prop>
   </node>
   <node oor:name="com.sun.star.text.TextDocument">
    <prop oor:name="ooSetupFactoryDefaultFilter" oor:type="xs:string">
     <value>MS Word 97</value>
    </prop>
   </node>
  </node>
 </node>
</oor:component-data>

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