Opening Word 08 documents in PC

[moselle]

When I emailed a Word for Mac 08 document with a .docx suffix to my office PC and tried to open it in Word, the document would not open. I tried changing the suffix to .doc, but that was denied also.

 

[Malke]

When I emailed a Word for Mac 08 document with a .docx suffix to my office
PC and tried to open it in Word, the document would not open. I tried
changing the suffix to .doc, but that was denied also.

You need to give more details. When you say you changed the extension
to .doc, do you mean you renamed it from your office PC or you did a Save
As on your home Mac and saved in the earlier Word format (.doc)?

If the former, then simply renaming a file from .docx to .doc won't change
it to the correct format. If the latter, quote the exact text of the error
message (because "denied also" doesn't tell us what we need to know).

Word 2007 (PC) and Word 2008 (Mac) use a different format than earlier
versions of Word (.doc either Mac or PC). As I mentioned above, you need to
Save As in the earlier format OR install the File Converters available from
the Microsoft Office website in your office PC which is apparently running
Office 2003 or earlier.

Malke

 

[John McGhie]

Do not change the suffix on a file, or you may 'cause' this problem. The
suffix tells the receiving computer which code is in the file: if it doesn't
match the content, you get this problem.

However, in this case, this is an error on the PC end.

There are some things you can try to help them work around it.

1) Tell the PC user to save the file to a folder before trying to open it.
PC email programs should not allow them to open Word documents directly from
their email, because that's how they get viruses.

2) Make sure you have enabled "Windows Friendly Attachments" if you are
using Apple email. If you are using Entourage, check "MIME" as your
encoding format and "Append Windows File Extensions" as your default for
sending.

3) Before sending your file, Zip it using the Mac "Create Archive" command,
which appears if you right-click the file in the Finder.

4) If the Windows PC is running a version of Word younger than 2007, it
needs a converter to open Word 2008 .docx files. Tell them to download it
from the Microsoft website.

Hope this helps

When I emailed a Word for Mac 08 document with a .docx suffix to my office PC
and tried to open it in Word, the document would not open. I tried changing
the suffix to .doc, but that was denied also.

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John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
http://jgmcghie.fastmail.com.au/
Nhulunbuy, Northern Territory, Australia