TECHdodo

I was working in Open Office the other day when I did something that caused my whole system to crash. It didn’t have anything to do with Open Office, I just happened to have a document open in Open Office when it happened.

When I next opened Open Office, it warned me there were some files that needed to be recovered because they were not closed properly. This has happened to me lots of times, so I didn’t think too much about it and I told it to go ahead and recover the documents. It has never failed me in the past. It looked like it was doing it and it prompted me for my password. It was a password protected document, so this is exactly what I was expecting, but when I entered my password, it told me it was an invalid password and to try again.

Ouch!

It wouldn’t recover the document. I tried it a few more times with the same results. I went out on the web and started looking for ‘dorrupt document recovery’ ‘corrupt odt document password’ ‘remove odt password’.

I found lots of tips and tricks. Renaming it to a .zip extension for example, and copying various components from it. This didn’t work for me. Zip would not recognize the file. Opening it in a HEX editor and trying to edit some bytes. This didn’t work either.

What finally did work was someone suggested making sure one was running the latest version, or even the latest release candidate version of Open Office.

I was using version 2.3 or 2.4 or the time, so I went to Open Office and downloaded version 3. It had come out a month or two ago, but the old version was working fine, so I never upgraded.

I installed version 3.0, opened the file, it told me it was corrupt and should I repair it. I said yes and then it asked me for my password. I typed it in, hit OK, and crossed my fingers. It opened right up. Everything was in tact, perfectly formatted, exactly as it had been.

If you are having a problem opening a corrupt Open Office document, especially a password protected Open Office document, make sure you are using the latest version of Open Office. It might not work for you, but it worked for me, and it certainly is probably the easiest thing to try.