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Occasionally libraries computer users have problems opening documents they have brought from home or work. To use your document on a library computer, the document and the application must be compatible.
Older libraries computers run Microsoft Windows 2000 with Internet Explorer 6 and Microsoft Office 2000 Professional. Newer machines have Windows XP with Office 2003, and these also have filters installed that will convert documents created with Office 2007. Microsoft Office documents can be loaded on libraries computers if these are saved in MS Office formats (Microsoft Word), but may not load if saved in Microsoft Works format.
Please note: Microsoft Word will not load documents from Microsoft Works (WPS format). This means that you cannot normally use documents from Works. A work-around for this is to save your documents in Works as Rich Text Format (RTF), which Word CAN load. Microsoft has some converters available that will theoretically allow Word to load Works documents. However, we have tested some of these, and the results were not good.
In brief: you can only use documents from Microsoft Works on library computers if you save them as Rich Text Format (RTF).
The other programs in the Office Professional suite are Microsoft Excel, Powerpoint and Access. At most service points, one computer has Microsoft Publisher.
These will load some documents from older versions and other software, but if your document was not created with a Microsoft application, then you may have to save it in a "standard" format before you can edit it on our machines. Standard formats include CSV (Comma Separated Values) for spreadsheets and databases, and RTF (Rich Text Format) and plain text (TXT) for word processed documents. Please note that while Rich Text Format (RTF) should preserve most of your document's layout, plain text does not.
For graphics editing, some of our computers (particularly scanner PCs) have Photoshop Elements, which is a flexible and capable program. Photoshop Elements can load and work with almost any bitmap graphics format. Other computers in libraries have only basic graphics software (Microsoft Imaging and Photo Editor).
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