You're reading an article from PHE's web content knowledge base - the best place to find answers to your content questions.
To browse more useful articles, visit our home page.
Benefits of saving in open formats
Saving documents as open formats (for example, ODT or ODS) ensures:
- documents can be accessed easily by all users
- there is no need to go back and 'fix' the document to make it accessible at a later date
- only one version of the document is required
Setting open formats as the default option in Microsoft Office
Microsoft Office doesn't have to save in Microsoft Word (.DOC), Excel (.XLS) or PowerPoint (.PPT) format.
It can be set up to save in open formats the first time around.
This saves you the extra step of converting documents to that format.
Set this up in Word
Click File to bring up the menu, and then select Options at the bottom of the panel
In the Options menu, please select Save
Then where it says Save files in that format, please select OpenDocument Text (odt)
Word will now save in ODT format automatically.
If you want to save a document in Word format (.DOC) in the future, you will need to select Save As Type... and then choose Word Document as the format
Set this up in Excel
Click File to bring up the menu, and then select Options at the bottom of the panel
In the Options menu, please select Save
Then where it says Save files in that format, please select OpenDocument Spreadsheet (ods)
Excel will now save in ODS automatically
If you want to save a document in Word format (.DOC) in the future, you will need to select Save As Type... and then choose Excel Document as the format
We hope this article was useful.
To share this article with a colleague, please send them this link: https://confluence.collab.test-and-trace.nhs.uk/x/UwkYIg
You can also return to the home page to browse more articles on knowledge base.