open office

[Dotan Cohen]

>    OO is made to open plain .doc files, not those with shading changes
> ect.
>

That might be a normal .doc feature.

OOo has reverse-engineered support for .doc files, however,
rarely-implemented features such as those possibly used in the OP's
file are not well tested as they are not widely used. The OP should
file an issue with OOo and attach the file. With Norman's permission,
I will do the triaging and file the issue myself if he cannot.

Of course, it should be obvious that .doc files are designed to be
difficult to open with anything other than MS Office. They are pretty
much memory dumps of MS Office, and earlier versions of MS Office have
a hard time with them. The .docx files, however, are XML and designed
to be opened in differing applications. But the spec is horribly long
(over 6000 pages) and like ODF there is no reference implementation.
Even MS Office 2007 does not fully implement the spec, and gets parts
if it wrong.

-- 
Dotan Cohen

http://what-is-what.com
http://gibberish.co.il