One day your password protected file works fine in OpenOffice, but the next you're locked out and it tells you that the password is invalid no matter how many times you restart and enter the password. Poof! Like that your work is gone. Or is it?
Searching the OpenOffice forums I found a solution to my woes. The answer was simply to download a legacy version of OpenOffice (3.3.0 to be precise) from the official Apache site.
I installed the older version over the top of the newer one and all worked as expected.
It was a curious bug because the day before in exactly the same version (OpenOffice 3.4.1) all was fine. (Note: the bug was also present in LibreOffice 3.5 when it occurred.)
Around the same time Apple was blocking Java in some form or other, which was all over the tech press, and even though they had released a Java update, which I had my suspicions might solve the issue, I left this as a second port of call after trying first: this simpler solution.
Installing and uninstalling OpenOffice is easier to do than uninstalling system software, and my first priority was to recover the data. If I'd updated Java and it had broken the new and old versions' ability to open the file, it would've spelt trouble.
Comments
Post a Comment