Trouble opening Word 5.x in Office X or Office 2004

[Rich Blatchly]

I am sorry to bother you with something that may have already been
covered. I have checked the knowledge base and read what I could find
of this group.
I am trying to open files created in version 5.x, and I get
strange characters only in some cases. In other cases, I get normal
looking text, but when copied to the clipboard it does not behave as
text, but gibberish (and the lines don't break correctly, indicating
that the program doesn't recognize words). In one case where the
strange characters showed up, I opened the same file in Word X, and got
text to show up, although it could not be copied to the clipboard. I
have tried changing styles and fonts with no success.
I have not looked at other old versions of Word (6, or later) because
I don't have them on this computer, although I do on another. I have
tried to find info about this through MS support and Google, and not
found anything helpful. I didn't see a translator to download on the
MS website, for example.
In working on this, I looked through the other documents in the
folder, and discovered that I could open some of them, but not others.
All of the files I have trouble with have the filetype WDBN, but so do
those I can open without trouble. The trouble seems to plague files
with a lot of editing (last versions of a multi-version document).
My system is 10.3.9 on a G4 powerbook, with Office 2004 for Mac
(updated to the latest version, which is 11.1.1, I think. It is at
least 11.1.0).
So--bad luck and corrupted files? If I am the only one this has
happened to, that's not impossible. It there is a bug with heavily
edited files from that era, it would be nice to have it fixed.
Thank you all--

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Gotta tell you, re "If there is a bug with heavily
edited files from that era, it would be nice to have it fixed"--the way the
software market developed in the US, the consumer is responsible for
ensuring long-term access to their data, not the software manufacturer.
Fact of life, so I doubt such a bug would get much attention, if it exists.

That said, I don't recall anyone else reporting similar problems, though you
should check the archives of the group--people may have offered up the
problem and solution.
http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.mac.office.word

The trouble seems to plague files
with a lot of editing (last versions of a multi-version document).

That does strengthen the idea that the files may be corrupted.

Does using File | Open with Enable set to Recover Text From Any File help at
all?

I suspect you'd be better off using the old version of Word that you do have
to see what you can get. If it offers "Save As RTF", I would suggest you do
that out of the older version, then ship the RTF into Word 2004. Or even,
better, Save As Plain Text.

Are you trying to recover formatting or just the content?

If you have a lot of Word 5.x files, you may want to purchase MacLinkPlus,
which promises to convert them. Unfortunately, they don't have a demo
version and it's unclear whether that would be any better than what you are
getting, especially if the reason is corruption.
http://www.dataviz.com/products/maclinkplus/mlp_xlators.html

Sorry not to have more to offer--definitely check the group archives.

 

[Rich Blatchly]

Daiya:
Thanks for the encouragement (.
To answer a couple of questions: yes, I do get some text from the
recover text only option. It is pretty complete, I think, but a little
disordered, as some content seems to be stored at the end of the file
rather than in place. It is better than nothing. And, yes, I would be
ok with text, as long as it's complete, although I have a bunch of
files with graphics that I begin to worry about.
Maybe this is another thread, but what should one do for archiving
these files? Should everything be saved as rtf or pdf instead of word
format? I know I should have known better, but I guess I assumed that
translations that worked fine in earlier versions could be preserved in
later ones--after all, the rules haven't changed.
In any event, thank you for your reply--I'll keep working on it.
Rich Blatchly

 

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

Hi Rich:

I would treat this in the following way:

1) Open the document in Word 2004

2) Ensure "Track Changes" is turned OFF (look up in the Help if you do not
know how: this setting has to be checked for each document)

3) Perform a File>Save As and choose Web Page. Make sure the box "Save
only display information" is NOT checked.

This will do three things for you:

A) It will remove all the deleted and edited text from the file, leaving
you with only the "final" version

B) It will force Word to clean up the internal structure of the file, which
it must do in order to write it out to a different format.

C) It will save the document in an "Open" file format that can be read by
almost any application going forward. The format is not actually HTML, it's
XML. XML-capable applications are just about to start hitting the Mac:
they've been around on the PC for a while -- Word was one of the first.

It is possible (quite likely...) that Word will beach-ball (hang...) at Step
3. If it does, that's an indication that the internal structure of the file
is seriously damaged and you will have to clean that up first.

Perform a "Maggie"

I) Create a new blank document

II) Carefully copy all EXCEPT the last paragraph mark of the old document.
Warning: If you copy that last paragraph mark, you will copy the problem...

III) Paste into the new document

IV) Save as a Word document with a new file name.

This technique cleans the internal structure of the document. You need to
inspect the document afterwards: some parts may have been unreadable in the
file and been discarded. Some of the formatting will be wrong and will have
been discarded -- numbered lists are one to look closely at.

Re-open the document and save as a Web Page after that. The "Web Page"
format you save is the new file format coming to Microsoft Office in the
next versions on the PC and Mac, and which is likely to be adopted by most
other applications in the near future (because it's a robust, open-standard
format...)

XML is quite a bit larger than Word Document format on disk, but it is much
more highly compressible, so if disk space is an issue, Zip the files or
folders afterwards. The result should be the same size or smaller than the
originals.

Cheers

Daiya:
Thanks for the encouragement (.
To answer a couple of questions: yes, I do get some text from the
recover text only option. It is pretty complete, I think, but a little
disordered, as some content seems to be stored at the end of the file
rather than in place. It is better than nothing. And, yes, I would be
ok with text, as long as it's complete, although I have a bunch of
files with graphics that I begin to worry about.
Maybe this is another thread, but what should one do for archiving
these files? Should everything be saved as rtf or pdf instead of word
format? I know I should have known better, but I guess I assumed that
translations that worked fine in earlier versions could be preserved in
later ones--after all, the rules haven't changed.
In any event, thank you for your reply--I'll keep working on it.
Rich Blatchly

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

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

 

[Rich Blatchly]

John:
Thank you very much for the suggestions. I am still working on
getting back exactly what I had lost (an active table of contents, for
example), but this is a huge improvement. I can see almost all of the
text, with a few dingbats missing, and the fonts and styles are intact
as far as cursory examination shows. The page breaks are almost all
intact.
I would never have thought something like this would work, and I am
pretty creative with work-arounds. Thank you again. It also sounds
like you are recommending that Word files be archived as html format.
I will have to consider that, as I use a lot of graphics and footnoting
with Endnote. It seems to me that the resulting files are not as
easily edited in html, but if the alternative is gibberish, html looks
pretty good. And the graphics look like they are saved in their native
format, so they may not suffer at all.
This still begs the question: if the information is in there, and
if MS claims that word opens these files, why is it not working
correctly from the beginning? As I mentioned, performance has
deteriorated since Office X.
I do understand that you don't represent MS, and don't want to
leave this message on that note. I appreciate the time you put in to
this, and the expertise. Thank you again.
Rich Blatchly

 

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

Hi Rich:

OK... If you use footnotes and endnotes extensively, then for now, you will
need to save back to the Word Document format. HTML in Mac Word does not
support these well. It will in the next version.

I do recommend that everyone adopts the new Office File Formats (XML) as
soon as they can, because XML is much more damage-proof than the binary .doc
format (it is also about a quarter the size, so I am told).

Graphics in Word 2004 are only saved in their native format if they were
raster graphics to begin with. PC Word can save vector images in XML, but
not Mac Word (yet...)

The information "may" be in there. Let me use an analogy: you pick up a
book, you can "read" it, but you may not "understand" all of the content.
The same thing can happen in the binary .doc format, due to errors (either
by the user, by EndNote, or by Word).

One of the reasons I recommend XML as the future format is that if the
information in the file can't be understood, the XML parser will warn you
when you save, not fail when you try to open...

One of the issues we have with academic-style texts is that citing
applications such as EndNote force a large amount of information into Word
containers that were only ever designed to hold a few characters. On a nice
sunny day with the wind behind you, they will get away with it. If the wind
changes...

Again, the XML format forces these applications to write their information
into structured tags that are designed for the purpose: expect fewer
corruptions as a result.

Hope this helps

John:
Thank you very much for the suggestions. I am still working on
getting back exactly what I had lost (an active table of contents, for
example), but this is a huge improvement. I can see almost all of the
text, with a few dingbats missing, and the fonts and styles are intact
as far as cursory examination shows. The page breaks are almost all
intact.
I would never have thought something like this would work, and I am
pretty creative with work-arounds. Thank you again. It also sounds
like you are recommending that Word files be archived as html format.
I will have to consider that, as I use a lot of graphics and footnoting
with Endnote. It seems to me that the resulting files are not as
easily edited in html, but if the alternative is gibberish, html looks
pretty good. And the graphics look like they are saved in their native
format, so they may not suffer at all.
This still begs the question: if the information is in there, and
if MS claims that word opens these files, why is it not working
correctly from the beginning? As I mentioned, performance has
deteriorated since Office X.
I do understand that you don't represent MS, and don't want to
leave this message on that note. I appreciate the time you put in to
this, and the expertise. Thank you again.
Rich Blatchly

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

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

 

[Clive Huggan]

On 14/9/05 4:36 AM, in article
(e-mail address removed), "Rich Blatchly"

This still begs the question: if the information is in there, and
if MS claims that word opens these files, why is it not working
correctly from the beginning? As I mentioned, performance has
deteriorated since Office X.

Rich Blatchly

Rich,

The main reason in your case is that Word 5.1 was the culmination of
Mac-only product development of Word. The Mac application was terminated and
another was ported from Windows for the highly unsuccessful Word 6, but
gradually improved thereafter. Some of us resisted "up"grading -- till Word
2001 in my case, later for many others.

I found the changes so profound that I started to record notes on the
differences and on features that were new to me, when I moved to Word 2001.
Four years later, having now moved to Word 2004, and having skipped Word X,
I'm still continually improving them. Despite growing in size (the page
extent is now about 170 pages) and covering significant changes in Word
2004, the underlying starting point is still migration from 5.1. So things
like the changes from glossary to AutoText and AutoCorrect, workarounds for
features that disappeared, and initial settings in Preferences to stop Word
doing more than you might want it to, are all covered -- albeit the
5.1-specific material is well in the minority.

The notes are titled "Bend Word to Your Will", and are available as a free
download from the Word MVPs' website
(http://word.mvps.org/MacWordNew/Bend/BendWord.htm).

[Note: The document is designed to be used electronically and most subjects
are self-contained dictionary-style entries. Be sure to read the front end
so you can use the document to best advantage and select the right settings
for reading it.]

If you download a copy, after reading the front end, see what you get when
you do a "Find" command for "5.1".

Cheers,

Clive Huggan
Canberra, Australia
(My time zone is at least 7 hours different from the US and Europe, so my
follow-on responses to those regions can be delayed)
============================================================

* A SUGGESTION -- WAIT FOR CONSIDERED ADVICE: If you post a question, keep
re-visiting the newsgroup for several days after the first response comes
in. Sometimes it takes a few responses before the best or complete solution
is proposed; sometimes you'll be asked for further information so that a
better answer can be provided. Good tips about getting the best out of
posting are at http://word.mvps.org/FindHelp/Posting.htm (if you use Safari
you may see a blank page and have to hit the circular arrow icon -- "Reload
the current page" -- a few times).

* AVOID SPAM: To avoid spam directed at contributors of newsgroups, you can
set up a "send-only" dummy e-mail account. Full guidelines are at
http://www.entourage.mvps.org/tips/tip019.html

============================================================