A PC created 20 page Word document shows up at over 2000 pages

[Aram Y.]

A client is forwarding me a file they created on a PC version of Word
2000. When I open it on my Mac version of Word 98, the document which
should contain about 20 pages ends up being over 2000 pages with
unreadable copy. Anyone know why this is happening?

 

[Beth Rosengard]

Hi Aram,

Check your File>Open dialog in Word. Do you have the "Show" popup set to
"Recover text from any file"? If so, that's your problem. Change it to
"All Word Documents" or "All Office documents". And remember for the future
that this setting is "sticky": It won't return to the default as it should;
you have to change it manually.

--
Beth Rosengard
Mac MVP

Mac Word FAQ: <http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/WordMac/index.htm>
Entourage Help Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org/toc.html>

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word]]

Hi Aram:

Beth's right, this has nothing to do with the fact that the document was
created on a PC.

Apart from the condition she mentioned, there are two other things that may
do this:

Page Break Before, and Narrow Margins.

1) Open the document and immediately switch to View>Normal View. This will
stop it paginating so you can get control of it.

2) Click in the first line of the document and use
Format>Style>Modify>>Paragraph>Line and Page Breaks and check that Page
Break Before is OFF. If it is on for the Normal style, every paragraph in
the document begins a new page, which is a common way to produce this
problem. Note that you must use Format>Style, not Format>Paragraph...
Format>Paragraph only changes the selected paragraph, you need to change
them all.

3) If it wasn't that, then use File>Page Setup... Change the Settings to
Microsoft Word and click Margins. Check all four margins to make sure they
are not larger than 2 cm (one inch). If the margins are too large, there is
no room to put the text and the document ends up as a long thin string.

4) If All else fails, we need to get the text out of that document without
the formatting. Choose Edit>Select All and then Edit>Copy.

5) Create a blank document with File>New.

6) Click in the new document and choose Edit>Paste Special>Unformatted
text.

Whatever is wrong will be discarded by this move. You get the unformatted
text back and you can reformat the document using styles far quicker than
you can find out what is really wrong.

Hope this helps


This responds to article <[email protected]>,

A client is forwarding me a file they created on a PC version of Word
2000. When I open it on my Mac version of Word 98, the document which
should contain about 20 pages ends up being over 2000 pages with
unreadable copy. Anyone know why this is happening?

--

Please respond only to the newsgroup to preserve the thread.

John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer,
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
Sydney, Australia. GMT + 10 Hrs
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]