[COLUG] Open Office Opening Documents

[Andrew J. Barr]

On Mon, 2007-01-22 at 19:35 -0500, Mark Erbaugh wrote:
> Thanks, that does the trick for opening a file from within OO
> Spreadsheet. Any way to do the same when opening a file in Nautilus?

Yes. First, however, remember that GNOME-VFS (hence Nautilus) and UNIX
in general believes 'extensions are meaningless'. This isn't entirely
true in practice, but GNOME uses the freedesktop.org MIME specification
to determine file type. This allows the definition of weighted tests for
magic bytes to determine a file's true type, but it also allows the use
of file extensions. So depending on what the tests are for text/plain
and text/csv, there may or may not be a distinction as far as Nautilus
is concerned.

Now that you have a little background :-) here's what you need to do:

For each file type (as recognized by nautilus) that you want to
associate with OOo Calc, do the following:

- Right click on a file of this type
- Select 'Properties'
- Select the 'Open With' tab
- Click 'Add'
- Select 'Openoffice.org Calc'
- Click 'Add'
- Close the properties dialog

You should now have the option to right click on files of this type an
select 'Open with "Openoffice.org Calc"'. You can make this the default
in that same dialog box but if Nautilus is recognizing the files in
question as text/plain (if it is, try changing the extension to .csv)
then I doubt this is what you want.

You can define your own MIME types but this involves manually editing
XML files and is best avoided.

Andrew

> Mark