Converting WP5.* to Word (yet again!)

[Sagara]

Hello, I've received a whole series of text files in WP5.* form. In Word
2003 they only show up in File/Open when I select All Files, but not when I
select WordPerfect 5.*. I've looked at most (if not all) the previous
discussions on converting WP to Word, as well as various web sites, but this
problem remains. I've even found a friend who has WP 10, and got him to make
some files and save them in both in WP 5.0 and WP 5.1, and again Word cannot
even see them when the WordPerfect 5.* converter is selected - they are only
seen in All Files. I've re-installed the Converters twice, as well as other
stuff from the WWW (I can see then in a converter called Recover Text From
Any File, but this produces so much stuff besides the text that editing out
all this and reformatting it would take on hour for each file!

Any ideas (they files are quite important to me).

Thanks,

Robert

 

[Adri]

The files are displayed based on the extension. In File/Open, if you look at
the description for any WP5x files, it says *.doc, therefore it is expecting
to see a .doc extension on the file name, which is fairly unlikely for most
WP files.

However, the fact that they only display when you choose 'all files' doesn't
mean that their conversion into Word will be any different than if they had
displayed when you chose WP5x. You're not actually selecting the converter
here, it's only a display. If you have the converter installed, the files
will convert. If you try to open them and get an error message, then you need
to install the converter.

 

[Sagara]

Hello Adri,
I'm afraid this makes no sense to me! If a file has the extention *.doc
then it is a Word file; if it has *.wp then it is a WordPerfect file. It
seems that the best way around this is to buy a very cheap version of
WordPerfect off ebay and read the files as they actually are - in WordPerfect
12 (going for a song on ebay) I can even convert then to Word! What Word 2003
with the correct converter gives me opening these wp files is a lot of gook!

Thanks,

Robert

 

[Adri]

Hi Robert,

Simply putting an extension of .doc does not make it a Word file, nor does
an extension of .wp (or .wpd) automatically make it a WP file. The extension
doesn't really matter, it's the act of saving it and choosing a file 'type'
that matters. Although both programs have a default file extension, you could
still save a file from either program with any extension you want (i.e. any 3
digit combination, not just .doc or .wpd) but that does not affect what
format it is, nor how they convert from one program to the other.

Depending on the files, you may indeed get a lot of 'gook' when converting
WP to Word. I've converted hundreds (probably thousands) of files from WP to
Word and some of them convert very well, others take so much time to clean up
it's faster to retype them. Sometimes you have better results opening them in
WP and saving as a Word file, sometimes not. It's kind of a crap shoot,
dependant on how the file was formatted in WP.

 

[Graham Mayor]

In order to make thy WP5 converter work with Word 2003, some registry
changes are required. The converter with registry patch is linked from the
downloads page of my web site.

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Graham Mayor - Word MVP


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[Sagara]

Hello Graham,

Thanks - this did the trick. When I open these WP files in Word 2003 now
they are completely cleaned, showing only the original text with correct
formatting. I did download your WPCONV.zip file yesterday, but I suppose it
did not work as I did not reboot! But, whatever the reason, it did this time!

Again, many thanks,

Robert