Starting from an existing document
All Writer documents are associated with the Writer application. This means that you can start OpenOffice.org automatically, simply by double-clicking a Writer document in a file manager such as Windows Explorer.
You can spot an OpenOffice.org Writer document by its icon: .
Note for Windows users
If you have associated Microsoft Office file types with OOo, then when you double-click on a *.doc (Word) file, it opens in OOo Writer.
If you did not associate the file types, then when you double-click on a Microsoft Word document, it opens in Microsoft Word (if Word is installed on your computer).
You can use another method to open *.doc files in OOo and save in the *.doc format from OOo. See Opening an existing document for more information.