How to open a Mac Word Document on Office XP?
June 3, 2007 10:06 AM   Subscribe

I have what appears to be a word file (no file extension) that was generated on a mac and sent to me via email. I am trying to open it up on a Windows box with Office XP but there appears to be a problem with Office recognizing the file encoding. Is there an easy fix using the PC (no access to a mac) that can be done pretty quickly?
posted by buttercup to Computers & Internet (13 answers total)
 
Try manually adding the ".doc" file extension.
posted by chrismear at 10:09 AM on June 3, 2007


Honestly, it should work already. How did you get the file? It's possible the data is just corrupted.
posted by BackwardsCity at 10:12 AM on June 3, 2007


(Oh, by email. I'd ask the sender to save it as an .rtf and send it again, if that's possible.)
posted by BackwardsCity at 10:12 AM on June 3, 2007


How do you know it's a Word document? And how do you define "a problem with Office recognizing the file encoding" -- that is, what specifically does Word say when you try to open it? And are you trying to open it by double-clicking it or File-Open within Word (if the former, try the latter).
posted by Doofus Magoo at 10:18 AM on June 3, 2007


If you have a gmail account, try attaching it to an email, then open it as a google document.
posted by Phatty Lumpkin at 10:35 AM on June 3, 2007


Er, I guess the email part is irrelevant. You can just upload it to google docs.
posted by Phatty Lumpkin at 10:40 AM on June 3, 2007


It's not from Word 2007, is it? You might want to try installing the Compatibility Pack .
posted by niles at 11:40 AM on June 3, 2007


When sending attachments in email on a mac, you are given the option of sending attachments that are "Windows friendly." If this option is unchecked, the attachments usually can't be opened on a PC. If possible, ask the sender to be sure that option was checked while attaching the document.
posted by milarepa at 12:26 PM on June 3, 2007


It's possible that the file is encoded in a multipart format that Windows doesn't understand (I've had this happen a few times with people on Apple Mail sending to my Gmail account). What fixed this for me was to download the file, open up UUDeview, and ask it to decode the file.
posted by mikeyk at 12:44 PM on June 3, 2007


It's not from Word 2007, is it?

Unlikely, since the document came from a Mac, and Word 2007 runs under Windows.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 2:33 PM on June 3, 2007


Yeah, manually adding the .doc to the end of the file name should work. Double-click on the file name to edit it, or right-click and select "rename" or whatever.
posted by librarina at 2:35 PM on June 3, 2007


And if you only want to see the text in the word document, this old unix trick should work (may be broken with an xml word file):

* Save the attachment to your home directory.
* Open terminal (in /Applications/Utilities )
* From the terminal window:

strings crappyattachment > text-version.txt

* Then open the text-version.txt with textedit

You lose all the formatting, and it get some junk in the file, but you'll get the text you need out of the word document.
posted by singingfish at 4:21 PM on June 3, 2007


Response by poster: Thanks for all the reponses. The file appears to have been corrupted from the source. The attachment appears in my gmail account as 'noname' and upon using UUDeview as suggested above, I can get the 'realfilename.doc' out of it, but Word still thinks its needs a translator and Gdocs will not recognize it either. It appears mostly as gibberish when you force it to open.

I did find a workaround to get the data I needed out of there and have contacted the source for a new copy.
posted by buttercup at 3:51 PM on June 4, 2007


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