Like wine, software has good years and bad years. For Windows Word, 2002
(Word XP) was NOT a "good year". If it's Word XP he's running, tell him to
visit Microsoft Office Update and apply ALL the updates he is offered,
whether they apparently have anything to do with Word or not.
It is likely that he is missing a graphics converter needed to open your
document: the service updates will put it in for him.
If he still can't sort it, then cut the spreadsheet out of the document and
save it as a file. Create a folder and place just the document and the
spreadsheet in it. Re-insert it into the document and this time choose
"Link to File". Now make a zip file of the whole folder and send that.
When he gets it, tell him to extract the folder to his hard disk and open
the document using File>Open from within Word.
If he has done it all correctly, the document will open straight up and so
will the spreadsheet.
When you paste the spreadsheet into the Word document, what you have is a
Mac Excel file embedded in a Mac Word file. If the user double-clicks the
result directly out of his email, as corporate users often do, the email
system is relying on the presence of the file name extension to identify the
application to hand it off to. The email program is not very smart about
this and does not look very hard.
If the document that arrives is a Mac Word document, and the PC is badly set
up, the email program will not know what to do with the file unless you have
added the .doc extension. So it will hand it off to the operating system.
Windows XP will then find Word and hand it off again, but Word will not
recognise the Mac Excel embed, and will not know what to do with it.
By separating the files and linking the spreadsheet back in, you can then
make sure that both files have the appropriate extension which identifies
the kind of content in the file: .doc for the document and .xls for the
spreadsheet.
After that, it should work no matter how badly he has his system set up at
the other end. I can tell you that this works just fine from my Mac to my
Windows XP box without any of this absurd fiddling around, but that's
because I took care to configure my system correctly
Hope this helps
from said:
I have a colleague who has Windows XP. I have sent a mac word x
document to him. The word x doc has an excel x pasted on it.
It seems that when he tries to open the doc his word XP crashes.
Any suggestions as to why?
thanks,
jmurphy
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John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer,
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
Sydney, Australia. GMT + 10 Hrs
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:
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