Word cannot open this document

[lady glen]

Hello there,

I am operating Office 2004 on OS 10.3x. I regularly edit word files on
both the mac and pc platform and copy them back and forth between the
two systems. Recently, I have had serious problems with word docs,
receiving the error message: Word cannot open this document. On the
mac, this error message continues...the document might be in use or it
might not be a valid word document.

I have used Cocktail to run routine maintenance and I have not had any
other problems with my mac. On the PC side, I am using Office 2003.

Help would be appreciated.

 

[John McGhie]

Not quite enough detail there, but I am afraid your document may actually be
"gone". You may have to use File>Open>...<Recover Text from Any File> to
get the text back.

But first: Is this "all" documents or only "some"? If it's only "some"
documents, the problem is in the document. If it's all of them, delete your
Normal Template and try again.

I have had at least one instance of Mac Word creating a document that PC
Word cannot open. If you can get the document open in either flavour of
Word, save the document as a Web Page, close it, then re-open the web page
and save again as a document. That completely rebuilds the document's
internal structure, and it will be fine after that.

Hope this helps

Hello there,

I am operating Office 2004 on OS 10.3x. I regularly edit word files on
both the mac and pc platform and copy them back and forth between the
two systems. Recently, I have had serious problems with word docs,
receiving the error message: Word cannot open this document. On the
mac, this error message continues...the document might be in use or it
might not be a valid word document.

I have used Cocktail to run routine maintenance and I have not had any
other problems with my mac. On the PC side, I am using Office 2003.

Help would be appreciated.

--

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

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410

 

[Fredrik Wahlgren]

Hello there,

I am operating Office 2004 on OS 10.3x. I regularly edit word files on
both the mac and pc platform and copy them back and forth between the
two systems. Recently, I have had serious problems with word docs,
receiving the error message: Word cannot open this document. On the
mac, this error message continues...the document might be in use or it
might not be a valid word document.

I have used Cocktail to run routine maintenance and I have not had any
other problems with my mac. On the PC side, I am using Office 2003.

Help would be appreciated.

Are your documents on a server? In that case, maybe it's left open by
someone else.

/ Fredrik

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Just to make sure it isn't this simple--if you are copying the files back
and forth via email, that can create encoding problems. Post back if so.

 

[lady glen]

John, thanks for helping me out.

I have erased normal.dot on both mac and pc. I have used open/recover
any text on both platforms. I cannot open the file in any other
program either. For example, in textedit, I can get the message "open
failed." The file is not a big issue because I was able to restore it
from a backup. But, the broader problem is my trust in ms word on the
mac platform and its ability to interchange with Office 2003 on the PC
platform.

This problem first occurred two weeks ago and it affected a huge
number of my files. I have thousands and did not check them all.

What happened is that I could not open masses of my files on the pc
after moving files from the mac via lacie hard drive to the pc. I had
updated in the other direction by overwriting the files on the mac
from pc through lacie drive and was stuck with unreadable files on the
two computers and on the lacie hard drive. Luckily, I had a full
backup of all my files on cd and was able to restore everything
properly. I went through folder by folder to restore files and I
thought I had everything back to normal when I tried to open a file
yesterday and got the same error. Again, i restored the damaged file
from cd.

But, the point is, I can't work on the two platforms interchangeably
if files are going to corrupt like this. I take a full dvd or set of
cds of my words files every week as a precaution and I have multiple
cd backups, now going back years. It is not so much a data loss issue
as a convenience issue. And, of course, I don't do a complete backup
everyday, only once a week or so.

Any advice/feedback welcome. Is Word on Mac 2004 really compatible
with Word on PC 2003?

 

[lady glen]

No server is involved and no email.

Each of my machines (the pc and the mac) are behind a wireless router.
I don't network them to each other; they just access the internet
through the router. I tend to work on one machine or the other,
carrying them back and forth to work, where they do connect to a
network, but only for internet. I do not keep any files on the network
at work. Everything is stored on local hd of each machine. I
coordinate the files through the external lacie hd by plain old
fashioned copying. Sometimes, I overwrite all of the files on each
machine; other times, I choose specific files.

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Lady Glenn:

First, let me allay your fears: Mac Office 2004 and PC Office 2003 documents
are more than just "compatible", they are exactly the same thing. I
regularly open files on my PC from my Mac, and on my Mac from my PC. The
underlying binary content in the files is not just compatible, it's the
exactly the same thing.

However, I seem to remember there was a critical error with the LaCie driver
on Windows XP that caused files to be corrupted. This should have been
fixed in Windows XP SP 2. I believe there was also a similar issue on Mac
OS X, but I have no details.

TextEdit won't be able to open a Word file properly (and neither will
anything else: the content of a Word file is not text, so text applications
can't open them).

I suggest that what you have is a LaCie problem, and they should be thrashed
within an inch of their life until they fix it.

That said, there are tricks you can do in Mac Office 2004 that PC Office
2003 can't emulate, and vice versa. But these are rare and most users will
never do them. If you use such a feature, the result is that the other
platform will display a different rendition of the text or (usually)
picture. But it won't fail to open it.

Hope this helps

John, thanks for helping me out.

I have erased normal.dot on both mac and pc. I have used open/recover
any text on both platforms. I cannot open the file in any other
program either. For example, in textedit, I can get the message "open
failed." The file is not a big issue because I was able to restore it
from a backup. But, the broader problem is my trust in ms word on the
mac platform and its ability to interchange with Office 2003 on the PC
platform.

This problem first occurred two weeks ago and it affected a huge
number of my files. I have thousands and did not check them all.

What happened is that I could not open masses of my files on the pc
after moving files from the mac via lacie hard drive to the pc. I had
updated in the other direction by overwriting the files on the mac
from pc through lacie drive and was stuck with unreadable files on the
two computers and on the lacie hard drive. Luckily, I had a full
backup of all my files on cd and was able to restore everything
properly. I went through folder by folder to restore files and I
thought I had everything back to normal when I tried to open a file
yesterday and got the same error. Again, i restored the damaged file
from cd.

But, the point is, I can't work on the two platforms interchangeably
if files are going to corrupt like this. I take a full dvd or set of
cds of my words files every week as a precaution and I have multiple
cd backups, now going back years. It is not so much a data loss issue
as a convenience issue. And, of course, I don't do a complete backup
everyday, only once a week or so.

Any advice/feedback welcome. Is Word on Mac 2004 really compatible
with Word on PC 2003?

--

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

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410