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I just downloaded Open Office to my Mac Book Air and installed it. When I tried to open it a message came up saying it's developed by an unidentified source and my computer settings only allow installation of programs from Mac App Store or identified developers. I don't know anything about code. What can I do?

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Is the OS Mountain Lion? – Mark Nov 19 '12 at 22:08

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You have just seen GateKeeper in action.

If you are confident you downloaded a safe copy of the program, you can tell your Mac to "trust" that program and let it past the gate.

  • Right click on the icon
  • Select Open
  • Read the dialog and agree or disagree to let that program run

The linked article above goes into much detail on GateKeeper and I would scan it and review the steps above. If you find a lot of software you need triggers the warning, you could relax the settings, but I prefer to keep them at the defaults as I like to know when new code runs on my Mac.

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Thank you for answering! I downloaded it from openoffice.org/sv/get How can I be sure it's safe? – Elinor Nov 19 '12 at 22:29
As with any other piece of software you have to trust the developers. What you can do is to validate your download against a checksum. I suppose that you've downloaded OOo_3.3.0_MacOS_x86_install_sv.dmg. Its MD5 checksum is 869e4b23022a7d318e3668003ea33a5c (from openoffice.org/download/legacy/md5sums/3.3.0_md5sums.txt). Open Terminal and type either md5 ~/Downloads/OOo_3.3.0_MacOS_x86_install_sv.dmg or md5sum ~/Downloads/OOo_3.3.0_MacOS_x86_install_sv.dmg (not sure of the top off my head). If the number you get coincides with the MD5 checksum above your download is OK. – jaume Nov 20 '12 at 9:00

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