Getting MS Works to save as .RTF or .DOC

Z

zag

Guest
A few of the new machines in work came with MS Works instead of Office.

To me this is a good thing (costs a lot less, does exactly the same 95% of the time), but to many people this is a *big* problem because the first time they send a document to someone using an Office application they are told there is a problem with their document - it's not saved as a .DOC or .XLS or whatever.

The fact that the document is perfect and Office is the problem because it doesn't have a native (or easy to use) converter for many other products escapes many people and they assume that the Works application is the problem instead.

Anyways, I know you can tell Works to save as Rich Text Format (.RTF) and that Word will happily open this and display it correctly, but I can't find how to get Works to default to this and after the first week or so I have found that people get tired of having to select their file type every time they save.

There *must* be a way to force Works to save as .RTF by default but it's not obvious to me.

Anyone out there know how to do it ?

z
 
OFFICE

what about the old machines that you are replacing. if they had office, you can legally install it on your new machines instead.works is sort of the betamax of office progarams and probably best avoided.
 
Re: OFFICE

I had thought of that and am doing it where possible, but a few of the machines are additional ones which aren't replacing old ones.

I have done a bit of searching around the net, and it looks like it can't be done - from what I have come across MS have been stripping out useful features of Works over time, essentially to force many people to move to Office. The main giveaway was the lack of a Tools.Options menu item - I thought this was because I hadn't enabled some other feature but it looks like they just don't provide this level of customisation.

It seems a waste of time and money for users to have to buy Works (when buying a PC from a manufacturer who doesn't ship without it) and then go and buy a very similar product from the same manufacturer because they deliberately omitted a useful software feature supported by almost all other document creation products. It's not as if Works is promoted as a -lite version of anything else. It is supposed to stand on its own features, but I guess it doesn't quite do that.

z
 
Re: OFFICE

I have considered it alright, but I am approaching this from the perspective that Works is shipped on the machines. I can install openoffice on the machines and then have to explain to people not to use Works or it will mess up their files (saving as .wks changing formats, etc . . .), or uninstall Works from their machines so they have no choice.

Or I could try what *should* be the easy route and just get Works to save as .RTF, but it looks like this is not going to be an option. There must be some registry key sommewhere in the depths of Works that can make this happen.

When people eventually cop on to this it is going to be a shooting-themselves-in-the-foot thing for Microsoft.

z
 
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