Problem with Saving a document in OpenOffice

I have the correct error statement from Open Office. It is:

Error saving the document (name of document): Error in writing sub-document content.xml.

It appears that the context.xml file in my document is corrupt. I've tried converting to a MS Word document then back again. While I now the document in Word (.doc) format I would like to convert it to the odt format.

To convert a doc into an odt. You open the file and go to save as. Then choose odt.

The document is saved as a .odt but when I try to save it I get the error codes given above.

I have tried to use the .doc version of the corrupted file with no success. I am able to open the document in both Word & OpenOffice format on a windows machine but am unable to do so on my ubuntu box. I've also discovered that the backup is also corrupted making recovery even more critical. Not sure if my OpenOffice program is corrupt or there are other issues.

I did see a web page that told you how to recover a file by editing the content.xml file with the odt file but I have not been able to find that web page again using Google.

Any help would be greatly appreciated in recovering this file!

Have you tried opening the .odt in googledocs or similar, (yes its open office) If it opens try saving it to googledocs then copying the file back across to your home system renaming the file to <filename_1>.odt to give it a new filename.

Then try opening the new file. If it now opens alter and save as again

Also can you tell me the exact version of OOO you are using... with the openoffice core code at the bottom the output of uname -a and the output of java -version

Please remember to remove any login details from the output of uname and java... prior to posting back

Thanks
Bambitheman

I have not tried what you have suggested. I was able to open the document on a windows platform that also has OO2.4.1 (same as on my notebook). I was able to save it both as a odt doc & MS word doc but when I bring the document back into my notebook it will not allow me to save it in either format.

The java version is 6.

I tried to re-install OO but I now have a problem with the Synaptic Package Manager. I will be posting that issue later this evening.

Is the document important?

Yes. I am trying to move paragraphs to a new document (1-2 at a time) hoping to avoid the same problem that the original file has. So far I've been able to recover one page from the corrupted document.

I found a web site that told me how to fix the problem but I didn't bookmark it & now I can not find it. It involved editing the content,xml file found within the document.odt. You unzip the file into a temp directory, remove data between two terms & the document is recovered. It will need to be reformatted but that's an easy task.

I'm going to post another issue involving the Synaptic Package Manager which occurred at the same time this issue came up. Not sure if they are related but I do wonder?

Also is there a way to recover a Ubuntu 8.04 installation using the CD? Perhaps a way to fix a broken installation?

Thanks for your help!

This question was expired because it remained in the 'Open' state without activity for the last 15 days.

Hi all - I hit this same issue today - on a doc I've been building for many days.

Tried various bits of editing to find the offending text but to no avail.

The fix that worked for me was to export (File, Save As...) as a .SXW files then open this new doc and export to .ODT

Worked for me - hope it works for others out there