Problems With Doc File Conversions

Word Viewer.

I have yet to find a free Office style app that doesn't have formatting problems when converting to be read by the actual Microsoft Word.

Use Google Drive Documents (word processor) ... it's free to use and you don't have to worry about formatting issues. Just password protect it. And give the code to trusted people.

Not to mention that edits and notes can be made and seen in real time. Just another route you can take.

I expect I'll have a similar issue, as I'm writing on a Mac laptop and will have to export the result in .doc at some point. The surest way is probably to find a friend with a Windows machine and MS Office, and test your files over there. That's what I plan to do.

megajo29 said:

I expect I'll have a similar issue, as I'm writing on a Mac laptop and will have to export the result in .doc at some point. The surest way is probably to find a friend with a Windows machine and MS Office, and test your files over there. That's what I plan to do.

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You can buy Microsoft Office for Mac. I've used it for years and it works perfectly. (You can save Word files for Mac in either .doc or .docx format).

What happens if you export in RTF (Rich Text Format) instead?

Look at Microsoft's OneDrive. It includes a free version of MS Word Online. It's fairly hamstrung, but I think it makes an accurate viewer.

With one caveat: Word isn't a Publishing program. It's a Word Processing program.
Couple of examples: MS Word doesn't do typesetting. Usually not a problem. Like I said, just an example. But Word also does not lock page layout. An example, totally hypothetical:

Let's say you're creating the .doc or .docx on a computer attached to a printer with minimum margin settings of 0.5". You see one thing. But you use that whole typeable area. You send that document file to someone with a printer that has 0.75" minimum margin. The document will change subtly for that person. A paragraph you saw as nine line they see as ten. Line and page breaks where you didn't expect them.

Over five or six pages, next to meaningless, usually. Start getting into 60,000 or 70,000 words (or more), and maybe it's more significant.

Anyway, it's also possible that LibreOffice, when it converts to .DOC, it's seeing hard carriage returns where you actually didn't have one. Since you have the same page layout both times, you see what you expect to see. But since the reader might have slightly different page layout, those hard returns become visible.

Maybe, as an exercise, convert it to PDF instead. I think LibreOffice does that. See if the reader sees the document the same way you see it. Or set your margins to 1" (I'm not aware of a printer outside of an dot matrix printer that requires larger margins). If the PDF is identical, then it's just a limitation of using Word Processing software (and the conversion between formats).

Reziac said:

What happens if you export in RTF (Rich Text Format) instead?

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That's what I was going to suggest.

I loathe Word and just had a similar problem with a conversion. Word now tells me that the file cannot be opened because it has been converted to a different version of Word. Duh, Word did the "conversion" - so dead file. #$%!?

.rtf is so much lighter, easier to use and, gods above and below I wish it were the standard. However, you can use an .rtf word processor and Word can open it without doing funky stuff. As long as Word can open your MS, I don't see why anyone would complain.

robjvargas said:

With one caveat: Word isn't a Publishing program. It's a Word Processing program.

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But...

Most of the publishing world now works in Microsoft Word. Including using templates and style sheets that prep the Word document for use in a layout program, now days it's often Adobe's InDesign. Many agents and publishers want Word documents, if you're choosing not to self-publish.

But, exporting to Rich Text Format (RTF) will almost always (I've never run into a case, but there could be one...) import properly into a Word document for anyone who needs one.

Of course, nobody expects a graphic designer to work with Microsoft Paint or even a decent Photoshop alternative. They expect pros to use professional grade software. Writers might want to take the hint and invest in a copy of Word, if not the entire Office suite. Office 365 Personal is about $100 a year for five systems, well within any professional writer's expense range.

If you hate writing in Word, don't. Convert to, and proof the conversion, in Word before sending it. If you don't want to do that, then you get to live with the alternatives, complications and potential drawbacks.

Jeff

Open Office, from which Libre derives, notoriously mangled .rtfs. I wouldn't want to risk it.

The problems I'm aware of with RTF:

There is no real standard for RTF. Microsoft's version is probably the most stable, and it goes downhill from there.

RTF conversions occasionally result in overlapped tags (possibly due to its, um, flexible standards), thus mangled formatting or missing words/linebreaks/etc. I'm guessing that DOCX imported into another program can have essentially the same problem (albeit from tags applied external to the main document, rather than inline), depending on how anal the importing program is about paired tags and the like. One that expects only correct tags WILL display mangled tags "wrong" or even act like the text is not there. Historically, Microsoft products have tended to be sloppy about formatting tags.

Never ever not ever use Typeover Mode when editing RTF; this can result in mangled formatting tags and missing words much as the above. You've Been Warned. (Incidentally this also applies in at least some versions of Word, and FrontPage up thru FP2000. Unfortunately, backspacing over half of a pair of tags can also generate the problem. Which you can't see in a WYSIWYG editor.)

Another option that's more universally readable is the older Word 6 format. In fact, the oldest version of Word that yours can export is probably the best bet for accuracy on the receiving end.

As to salvaging mangled Word documents, if it's the newfangled XML-in-a-ZIP variety, unzip the file and root around til you find the biggest file in there. That will be your document text.

If it's an older version, use a text-stripping tool to extract the text. I use a DOS utility called Xray, and it does a pretty good job. [Link is to my copy, otherwise you'd have to root it out of old BBS file archives]

At the command prompt:

XRAY yourfile.doc > newfile.txt

and then you edit all the junk out of newfile.txt and there's your raw text again, more or less intact.


If Microsoft's Word Viewer won't play nice, there's also a program called DocX Viewer that does a fair job reading the new type of Word docs. From the latter at least, you can Select All, then copy/paste into a text document. I have occasionally had to do this when beta'ing something.

What was the question?

We used to use the DocX Viewer at GUD because people kept sending us .docxs in defiance of the guidelines. Finally I got an add-on for Word that fixed the issue.

I always write in .rtf and haven't noticed any problems with using typeover. But then perhaps I wouldn't! lol

I've always used word, though I'm resistant to upgrading it. Still have word 2003 on my computer. I'm not thrilled with word 2010, which is what they have on the computers at my work. I hate the way they've moved all the menus around. It works fine to open files between the two formats, though I haven't tried submitting to agents and such yet. Most of them seem to want e-mail submissions or use forms, not attached files, though maybe they want the word file if they're asking for a full?

I got an ipad recently and looked into getting word for use on it, but argh! They don't sell the program anymore, just rent it by the year. I really balk at this, especially since it puts me at the mercy of any "upgrades" they come out with that I might not want in the future.

Office 2010 and windows 8 really made me wonder if the folks at Microsoft even use their own software sometimes.

I hate Word 2010. I used to have a basic idea of how to navigate Word, but no more. Today I wanted to compare documents and had to search the Help (my own fault--I'd saved a new file for a major edit then at some point inadvertently switched back to the older file). I used to know how to do this stuff, damnit!

I have MS Word, and I have LibreOffice, and have no problems at all switching files back and forth, as long as I save to 97/2000/XP/2003 I have LibreOffice defaulted to this.

I also have no problems if I save to RTF, which I do when I don't know for sure what word processor someone else has. My version of Word, and the version I had before, opens both of these perfectly.

RTF actually works best for many situations because any good e-mail system can also preserve RTF formatting.

Jamesaritchie said:

I have MS Word, and I have LibreOffice, and have no problems at all switching files back and forth, as long as I save to 97/2000/XP/2003 I have LibreOffice defaulted to this.

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Whenever I tried to open one of my documents created in Word using OpenOffice, it would remove my paragraph indents and any italics.

RikWriter said:

Whenever I tried to open one of my documents created in Word using OpenOffice, it would remove my paragraph indents and any italics.

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That's odd. I started using StarOffice before it was even called that, and then switched to OpenOffice, and then to LibreOffice. I've never had that problem.

How are you making the paragraph indents? Using the tab to do so might be the problem? Is Word set to use DocX by default? This, too could be a serious problem.

But I really don't know. I have both Word and LibreOffice defaulted to Word/97/2000/XP/2003, and I've never had a problem with these defaults, or when I use .rtf in both.

Orianna2000 said:

Is Word Viewer free? I followed the link provided by Rez, but I couldn't tell if there was a fee or not. I'm assuming it will display the .doc file as someone else might see it, so I can find any formatting errors, right? But how can I fix them, if they don't exist on my copy of the document?

I have looked into buying Word, but their website is less than helpful. For starters, I can't figure out the difference between the Home and Business versions of Word. The Business version seems to come with all kinds of features I don't need, like an email address and up to 25 users, but when I tried to look up the Home version instead, it took me to a page for the entire Office Suite, which is more expensive and not what I'm looking for. (Sorry, going off-topic! Just frustrated.)

P.S. Thanks for all the suggestions!

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You are going to have to buy the entire suite, whichever version of Word you get. The Business version simply comes with programs and features that you don't get with the Home version, and won't need, anyway, though there is no better e-mail system than MS Outlook.

Jamesaritchie said:

How are you making the paragraph indents? Using the tab to do so might be the problem? Is Word set to use DocX by default? This, too could be a serious problem.
.

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To answer the second question first, I make sure to save the document as Word 2003, not 2010 as I have 2003 on my desktop.
For the other, yes, I use tab for the initial indents. Why is that a problem? Can Open Office not read that? How do you indent your paragraphs?

RikWriter said:

To answer the second question first, I make sure to save the document as Word 2003, not 2010 as I have 2003 on my desktop.
For the other, yes, I use tab for the initial indents. Why is that a problem? Can Open Office not read that? How do you indent your paragraphs?

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Using tab for initial indents can mess up all sorts of software out there. You need to set your word processor to use auto indent. This will save you a world of conversion problems.

WeaselFire said:

But...

Most of the publishing world now works in Microsoft Word. Including using templates and style sheets that prep the Word document for use in a layout program, now days it's often Adobe's InDesign. Many agents and publishers want Word documents, if you're choosing not to self-publish.

Click to expand...

So you have to specially prep a MS Word document to get the document into a proper publishing software like InDesign. This isn't a shortcoming of MS Word, by the way. Word was never, ever designed to support publishing.

Can you create macros and scripts to mimic a real publishing program? I don't doubt it. VBScript is a fairly powerful macro engine for all MS Office software. But, two things:

One, most writers don't have that time. And two, it's still not a publishing program.

Under Paragraph, Indentation, I use Special, first line indent to 'tab' my paragraphs. Nobody's complained...yet . And yes, Word defaulted to .docx when I bought it, but I beat it into submission and now it defaults to .rtf, which is an open format.