As an open source and Linux enthusiast I've always been pushing Linux for everyone who I think will enjoy the experience and the freedom that comes with it. My wife had so far stuck with the Windows Vista that came with the computer but some recent Blue Screen of Death events and a document that was eaten by Microsoft Word have changed her mind. Now she has Linux Mint.

But about that document. She was writing stuff down at a lecture, and well, forgot to press the save button every now and then. After a few pages of text, Microsoft Office decides to call it a day and crashes, eating the text. Often when this happens, Word will sometimes remember that it had text open and prompt the user to recover the text. Well, she restarted Word and of course Word denied knowing anything about any text she had written in the last hour or so.

Later when she got home, I snooped around in the file system and found some .ASD files, which are the recovery files for Word documents. So why didn't Word see that there was a document to recover? Who knows, probably not even Bill Gates. Tried several things from instructions around Google, but to no avail. Word claimed the file "can not be recognized". It's a backup file but Word cannot recognize it, nifty.

So I finally get the permission to wipe out Windows and replace it with some Linux freedom. After installing and updating, I changed OpenOffice to the new LibreOffice and remembered this pesky .ASD file with the text that Microsoft ate. Wouldn't hurt to try if it opens, would it?

It does.

LibreOffice - opens Microsoft formats that Microsoft doesn't open.

Ps. PPA install now available for Ubuntu, just copy paste a few commands from here.

[ humour // editors // linux // windows // operating systems // open source // libreoffice ]