Not a Valid Web Archive??

[Dave]

I'm running Office 2004 on a Mac Mini under OS 10.4.8. On Saturday I
exported an item from my mail to tidy it up before transferring it to my
Pilot. That's something I do quite frequently.

When I tried to open the (text) file, Word said "This is not a valid Web
Archive" and refused to open it. Everything else I have on the Mac which
will open text files was quite happy with it. Anyone got any idea what
Word was objecting to?

TIA,

Dave

 

[Peter Jamieson]

To open the file correctly in Word, your best bet is to check
Word|Preferences|General|"Confirm conversion at Open" my guess is that when
you then try to open the file, Word will pop up a dialog box with the Web
Archive option highlighted. Try the Text Only option instead.

My guess is that the text in your file starts with something like

"MIME"

or even

"MIME-Version: 1.0"

Word tries to determine the type of file it is opening and even on Windows,
where a lot of things are usually driven by file extensions, Word does not
rely completely on the file extension. For example, some ".doc" files are
actually RTF format files and Word recognises that and does the right thing.
But an RTF file is, from another perspective, just a text file that you can
open and read perfectly well - in a manner of speaking - with a plain text
viewer.

The procedure Word uses to determine file type on Mac probably differs from
the procedure it uses on Windows, but I think some details are the same. In
essence, Word asks each "converter" it knows about, internal or external,
whether it recognises the file format or not. If the converter says it does,
Word will try to open the file using that converter and at that point, if
the converter fails, Word doesn't try the next converter - you just see a
message.

Since it's left up to the converter to decide how much checking to do on the
file format, and some converters only look at the beginning of the file, the
converter can say "I recognise that!" at first, then in effect say, "Oh no I
don't!" when Word actually asks it to do the conversion.

Peter Jamieson

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

Probably the encoding. If it's in UTF-16, there needs to be a byte order
mark as the first character. The other applications may be "guessing". Try
what Peter suggested.

I'm running Office 2004 on a Mac Mini under OS 10.4.8. On Saturday I
exported an item from my mail to tidy it up before transferring it to my
Pilot. That's something I do quite frequently.

When I tried to open the (text) file, Word said "This is not a valid Web
Archive" and refused to open it. Everything else I have on the Mac which
will open text files was quite happy with it. Anyone got any idea what
Word was objecting to?

TIA,

Dave

--

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John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Business Analyst, Consultant
Technical Writer.
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410