Page 1 of 2

Word documents. Grrr!

Posted: 2008-08-06 01:23:48
by HeatherKay
I've got the latest NWE update, and (finally) I'm up to date with the Mac OS, but I'm increasingly coming across MS Word documents from PC users that cause NWE and TextEdit to spit out their dummies*.

I think it's caused by silly clients who insist on embedding humungous images in their documents. I have a document here where it's 45MB, yet it's only two pages long. My copy of Word vX opens it without breaking into a sweat, yet TextEdit claims it's an unknown format, and NWE goes into a comatose state while trying to typeset something, requiring a force quit after several minutes of making the whole system stagger to a crawl.

Is there anything that those nice Nisus guys might be able to do to help me purge MS software entirely from my Mac? I hate having to keep Word hanging about like a bad smell just to cope with idiot client files. If it helps, I can make the errant files available for download somewhere.

Thanks!

*Pacifier for our US cousins.

Re: Word documents. Grrr!

Posted: 2008-08-06 10:12:14
by martin
Thanks for the offer to upload the file, we can certainly take a look and see if there's anything to be done. Can you send the link to:

Image

Thanks!

Re: Word documents. Grrr!

Posted: 2008-08-06 10:49:21
by HeatherKay
Thanks Martin.

Sadly the file is at my office, and I'm not now there until Monday.

I'm sure it can wait, though.
:wink:

Re: Word documents. Grrr!

Posted: 2008-08-06 11:53:36
by martin
Well, in the meantime we'll all be happy that you have four days away from the office :)

Re: Word documents. Grrr!

Posted: 2008-08-06 14:01:56
by xiamenese
Heatherkay,

There is an issue with some versions of Office which nothing but Office will open directly. I'm continually having problems with Windows/Office 97 and 98 ... I have to run them through MacLink Plus! It includes Excel files. Which version of Word was your file produced on? Do you know?

Mark

Re: Word documents. Grrr!

Posted: 2008-08-07 12:59:54
by HeatherKay
xiamenese wrote: Which version of Word was your file produced on? Do you know?
'Fraid I don't, but I'd hazard a guess at a fairly recent version for Windows. I could probably check when I get back to the office by looking at the Info panel in the Finder.

Martin, while I'd love to have a few days relaxing, today saw me at the dentist (eek!), tomorrow I'm at the osteopath (ouch!) and the weekend will be busy as well (boo!). I'll make sure I remember to upload copies of the files first thing Monday UK time.

Cheers!

Re: Word documents. Grrr!

Posted: 2008-08-09 00:58:43
by spinningdoc
An alternative is to just machine gun the clients.

Re: Word documents. Grrr!

Posted: 2008-08-11 23:59:52
by HeatherKay
Mmm, machine gun. :D

I've remembered to upload now. Email duly sent.

I'd be interested in any results, but it's not essential to my daily existence.

Cheers

Re: Word documents. Grrr!

Posted: 2008-08-12 10:27:34
by martin
Thanks for taking the time to put up the file for us to look at. It seems to be the graphics in the file that cause our .doc importer to fail. We'll look if there's anything we can do.

Re: Word documents. Grrr!

Posted: 2008-08-12 23:39:06
by HeatherKay
Heh!

Perhaps the machine gun would be the best option to train clients not to embed graphics in their Word documents.

I'm not sure what it is about MS Office or the people that use it that, when I ask them to send me a JPEG, the place it in a Word document and send me that? I mean, why not just send me the JPEG? :x

:wink:

Re: Word documents. Grrr!

Posted: 2008-08-13 00:48:31
by spinningdoc
My experience is that they're the kind of people who don't understand that Word is not the same thing as Windows, and that not every file in the world is a Word file. I used to work at a place that kept various logs and ledgers in Excel spreadsheets. About once a month someone would open them in Word, notice they looked 'wrong', and close them, resaving as they went, and screwing up the file...

Re: Word documents. Grrr!

Posted: 2008-11-02 07:51:32
by Jazzvibe
We have problems with Word docs too. I have the pleasure of dealing with a very upset and frustrated teenager who constantly gets Word .doc files from friends while working on school projects together. We need to open and edit those files in Nisus but the cursor simply disappears, jumps around or Nisus just freezes altogether.

We really need this to work properly. Any suggestions.

MF

Re: Word documents. Grrr!

Posted: 2008-11-02 19:38:41
by dshan
Jazzvibe wrote:We have problems with Word docs too. I have the pleasure of dealing with a very upset and frustrated teenager who constantly gets Word .doc files from friends while working on school projects together. We need to open and edit those files in Nisus but the cursor simply disappears, jumps around or Nisus just freezes altogether.

We really need this to work properly. Any suggestions.

MF
MacLinkPlus Deluxe
Apple Pages (iWork)
Open Office 3.0

All of these can convert both .doc and .docx Word documents into .rtf that NWE can handle. I've got all three (but that's probably overkill) and normally use them in the above order until I find one that can convert anything too gnarly for Nisus to cope with. Open Office is big, complicated and butt ugly (Word with a hangover!), but it is free.

Re: Word documents. Grrr!

Posted: 2008-11-02 21:29:10
by xiamenese
I have those three too, and was going to recommend either OpenOffice or NeoOffice. I prefer the UI of OpenOffice, but find that in many things NeoOffice performs better, though that's subjective, except for one point.

I do a lot of sending files backwards and forwards to colleagues using Chinese Word. Any Chinese I send to them from OpenOffice has problems ... sometimes the first person can read it, but if they just forward the file to another without saving it out themselves, that other person gets binary, not a readable font. This doesn't seem to be so much the case with NeoOffice. With Nisus apparently intending to switch from AbiWord to OpenOffice for the file conversions, I'm concerned the same problem will crop up there.

Mark

Re: Word documents. Grrr!

Posted: 2008-11-07 16:36:39
by dshan
dshan wrote:
Jazzvibe wrote:We have problems with Word docs too. I have the pleasure of dealing with a very upset and frustrated teenager who constantly gets Word .doc files from friends while working on school projects together. We need to open and edit those files in Nisus but the cursor simply disappears, jumps around or Nisus just freezes altogether.

We really need this to work properly. Any suggestions.

MF
MacLinkPlus Deluxe
Apple Pages (iWork)
Open Office 3.0

All of these can convert both .doc and .docx Word documents into .rtf that NWE can handle. I've got all three (but that's probably overkill) and normally use them in the above order until I find one that can convert anything too gnarly for Nisus to cope with. Open Office is big, complicated and butt ugly (Word with a hangover!), but it is free.
Of course now there is the new translator in Nisus Writer Pro 1.2 as well to consider. It uses the translator from Open Office 2.4 and can handle MS Word .doc binary files much better than the old one used by Nisus Writer Express, it should resolve Jazzvibe's problems. Though it would require the cost of an upgrade from NWX to NWP. Which makes me wonder if Nisus are planning a new version of Express that uses the new translator too? That would be really helpful for Express users, and with the new NWP document backup options as well it would be simply awesome of course... :)