New user can't open Word files--at least not the ones I need

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epicenter
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Joined: 2005-02-13 07:15:59
Location: San Francisco
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New user can't open Word files--at least not the ones I need

Post by epicenter »

I've just tried Nisus Writer for the first time, in 30-day trial mode (Mac OSX), and haven't yet managed to open the Word file I need at all. I've tried Open, drag & drop, Open With, and voodoo

It could be that the files I chose to start with happen to be the worst start test (or best for bug-finding!) and are the rare exceptions that won't open.

Here's what I did:

When I open a TextEdit file, it does fine, and opens in RTF format. A Mac Word 5.1a file doesn't work (launches the application but opens nothing), so I converted a few files from 5.1 into Word 2001 and here's my result:

File 1 gets stuck on "Typesetting Text..." and never opens a file, nor does it respond to my clicking Cancel and I have to Force Quit NWE).

File 2 gets past "Typesetting Text..." (in grey instead of color!) but opens a blank page instead of the file (with the proper title though).

Files 3, 4, 5 open fine. The only difference seems to be that file 1 has borders formatted around the opening paragraph, and both files 1 & 2 have a section break.

So I started selecting parts of file 1 and pasting them into a copy of file 3 to see if it had an effect. Sure enough, I could get it to lock up on "Typesetting Text..." but not on any particular thing. When I thought I had the section that caused the lock, I pasted it in again and the file opened this time, but when I copied and pasted the whole contents again, I hade to Force Quit again. Weird!

Any suggestions? And any way to open a Wrod file with Borders properly portrayed? (even when it opens, it leaves out paragraph borders)

[note, I put these questions in another thread, but then realized that thread may be dead--I'm not familiar with online forum methods--so started a new one and hope that's okay]
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