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Disorienting documents

Today, a woman working on an MS-Windows XP workstation in an adjoining room was sent an MS-Word 2007 document. LookOut was sore confused about what to do with it, & her MS-Word 2003 application refused to deal with it. So she forwarded the email to me.

It went out through a Perth-based ISP, in through a different Perth-based ISP, arrived on my server in Melville. I fetched it back through those ISPs again to East Perth.

Saving the .docx file from KMail on my Mandriva 2009.0 Linux-based laptop, then opening it with OpenOffice Writer 3.0.1 worked, so I SaveAs’d it as an MS-Word 2003 .doc file, then exported it as a PDF, & sent those back... where they wound up on a virtual host in Malaga.

She fetched the email back to East Perth, was then able to read & edit the document.

So... a document assembled in Microsoft Word under Microsoft Windows could not be read using Microsoft Word under Microsoft Windows, but could be read under a non-Microsoft application under a non-Microsoft operating system, repaired, then returned to Microsoft Word under Microsoft Windows to be read & edited.

Well... I felt disoriented after that... (-:

Comments

GregoryO said…
There's a tool which can be installed in Windows to seamlessly convert (say) a .docx file to a .doc file. Doesn't work 100% but well enough for our purposes so far. I'll post a link when I can find it.

That said, I didn't realise OOo did it at all, let alone well enough to satisfy an IT-ambivalent individual. I'll check it out.
Leon RJ Brooks said…
I think OOo version 3 onwards (might have been a revision or two later). IW4M, anyway. (-:
Flesh Crawl said…
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
austux said…
For the record, since soon after LibreOffice forked from OpenOffice (thus, no longer so dominated by Oracle), the MS-Office compatibility features have been stellar.

Oh, and editing HTML with LibreOffice Writer is a whole different universe to editing same with MS-Word. Likewise, copy/pasting text from a web page into Writer works very well (there is very little, if any, tidying-up to do).

There are a few often-used web-sites where I push saved (as HTML) web pages through a gawk script and within a very few minutes I have some quite readable/portable documents to hand via Writer.

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