Problem reading Word 2003 document

users
#1

I'm new to this e-mail list, so excuse me if this is something discussed already.

I've been very pleased with LibreOffice on many fronts. I recommend it to everyone. As a matter of fact, I use it instead of Word at every opportunity. At work, though, I use Word because that's what's installed.

I write a newsletter for the American Legion. Since it was developed in Word, I use my old student copy of Word 2003 to create it each month. I have to provide both a .doc and .pdf of the newsletter to the printers. My trick, since Word 2003 doesn't offer a .pdf output, is to read the .doc with LibreOffice (3.5) and publish it to .pdf.

For the first time in months, LibreOffice can't seem to recognize the .doc format. I'm using the same version of Word that I've used for months. The newsletter is basically the same file, which I copy and modify for the new month. For whatever reason, LibreOffice tries to open it as a text file. It initially asks what text encoding it should use, waits for a long time, and then opens a garbage document.

Is this a known problem? Did I do something to the document that caused it to be read incorrectly?

Thanks for any ideas on this.

Chris

#2

Which subversion of 3.5 are you using?

doc formats are generally well behaved for importing into LO. Occasionally there is file that does not load correctly.

You might try saving the file as rtf and try opening that in LO. Once you get the newsletter to open is to save it using ODF formats instead of doc format.

One trick you can try is to rename the Libreoffice users folder - I am not sure on Windows where it is. Restart LO and the folder will be recreated. If there is a garbled setting this sometimes fixes the problem.

If you can post a typical file to Nabble someone may be able to see if they can replicate the problem.

#3

You could install BullZip PDF printer.  With this installed you print your Word 2003 document Word 2003 and with BullZip PDF Printer selected as the printer, you get a window displayed saying where you want to save the PDF file.  You click OK on this and the PDF is saved on the Desktop and Adobe PDF reader opens with the PDF being displayed.  No need to open in another program to get a PDF out.
 
I have been converting documents from Lotus Ami Pro and Windows Write for quite some time and have found BullZip PDF printer to be very good.  You can download it form BullZip.com here:-

http://www.bullzip.com/products/pdf/info.php

Note that there are other free PDF printers available, but I like this one Cimetry is another one that I have used.
Declan Moriarty

#4

Hi :slight_smile:
I find that opening Doc files in LO to edit or convert to Pdf is not always ideal.  For my companies Newsletter i was eventually forced to create a fresh Newsletter in Odt using roughly the same ideas for layouts that had been in previous newsletters.  It made a huge positive difference to productivity.  Much easier to place images exaclty in the right places.  The tons of logos at the bottom don't overlap or leave odd uneven spacing anymore.

That gave me more time to play around with other features so now all those logos are clickable and the newsletter has a Table-of-Contents that people can click to get to the right places.  Also i modified the styles so now when someone gives me an article i paste in as unformatted text and then apply styles, and then proof-read.  In Word i often had to spend hours un-stuffing-up people's formatting.

When i am ready to share it with others i use LO to "Save As ..." Doc and everyone on any version of MS Office finds it looks the same to them so we don't suffer from the problem of half the office using MSO 2007 and the others using 2010.  Unfortunately MSO can't handle images so well so sometimes the images wander off but at least they do it consistently for all versions of MSO.  I ended up installing LO on everyone's machines (and a couple of fonts) so they can all see the newsletter as it should be now.

I guess i don't alwys need to Pdf it so that everyone sees it the same now but i still do because it's easy and uncompressed Pdf prints nicely.

Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#5

Hi.
Did you update your version of LO. Possibly this is related to the thread with subject MS Office MacIntosh to Libre Writer Windows. There was a bug filed (<https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=53909>) and seems to apply to LO > 3.5.4 and LO < 3.6.4.
Steve

#6

Wow, what a lot of great responses. Thanks, all.

To answer a number of questions:

I was using an older version of LO (I just got notified when I brought it up this month that a new version was available). Both versions could not open the .doc file. The 3.5 version I am using now was updated this last weekend (3.5.7.2).

Word 2003 and LO are running on the same machine, running Windows 7.

I didn't consider writing it as RTF and reading it into LO. I'll try that next time.

I'm guessing the LibreOffice folder is the one under "C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Roaming\LibreOffice.

It was suggested I post the file to Nobble. I'm willing to do that, but I don't know what that is. Google doesn't provide anything useful.

I will definitely look into the Bullzip PDF printer (I've downloaded it). I have a PDF printer somewhere (when I bought OmniPage 18), but I can't seem to find the CD. My biggest goal in bringing up this issue was to help the LO developers fix a problem. I was ultimately able to send the .doc file to my work computer and generate PDF there.

Just so you know, I'm not a huge fan of .PDF. The only reason I have to provide .PDF is because the company we use to print the newsletter requires it. Apparently, the .PDF format is a lot smaller, too, so it is what the American Legion suggests. We send the newsletter to about 250 people each month.

I tried the "Open and Repair" option (that was new to me). It came up with a bunch of errors for all the images that were in the document. I then saved the file, but it made no difference. It still doesn't recognize it as a Word document.

I tried "Save as..." with a different name. It was said that this would do a garbage collection. New name has the same problem. It's not recognized as a Word document.

Odt files: Okay, I had a bad experience with OpenOffice. When I contacted the e-mail support group, they said I shouldn't save files on a flash drive. Then someone told me how to unpack the .odt file and fix it with an editor. Okay, that's the last time I wanted to trust the .odt format. I've heard that LibreOffice is much better maintained, but I hadn't trusted the .odt format. I usually save .doc, .rtf or .html formats. I've never had a problem with them. Maybe I should give the .odt format a try again.

Thanks again for all the great suggestions. I've got some work to do to try some of these things.
Chris

#7

Hi :) 
I think people were saying that Rtf is worth avoiding.

Odt recently had an upgrade and is now on it's 1.2 release.  You were probably using it 2 releases ago when it was on 1.0.  Also it is becoming more popular now that both Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice are getting developed a lot faster and bugs dealt with better now that there are far more devs ibn both projects (and probably some that work on both still).  So pretty soon Odt is likely to be something that is unavoidable.

People often lose flash-drives, or accidentally leave them in machines,  each year a surprising number accidentally get dropped down the loo or into beer-glasses.  It's quite an easy target for people to steal.  People sometimes just pull them out of machines without using the "Safely remove usb-stick" things that in Windows is in the "System tray" fairly near the clock.  Drives that are formatted to be read by Windows (so Ntfs and all the Fats incl vFat) get corrupted easily.  So, flash-drives are not the safest way of storing data and any data you value should be safely on a proper hard-drive somewhere and backed-up from there.

It's interesting to hear people say they have never had any trouble with something when describing a situation they are having trouble with it in.  My boss was telling me he has never had trouble with Internet Explorer but couldn't download any Pdfs.  So i tried his machine and found that Firefox could download the same Pdf he was having trouble with.  Then i reset his default Pdf reader to Foxit and found both FF and Internet Explorer could then download the Pdf.  Antivirus scans turned up nothing.  He switched back to using Adobe and again IE couldn't download the Pdf.  Then he spent all afternoon fixing it during which time he said he had a similar problem on his home machine and it was easy to fix.  He still says he's never had any trouble with IE or Adobe.  Sometimes we just don't notice things we are used to dealing with but grumble at the slightest problem we have with an unfamiliar tool.

The advantage with Pdf is that everyone gets to see the document exactly as you intended it to be laid out.  The problem used to be that you would have to rely on Adobe software to read it and needed to pay money to buy something to produce them.  Nowadays pretty much anything can write Pdfs including a lot of OpenSource (usually free and also Free)  programs.  Editing them is still a bit of a pain but then you always have the original in an editable format such as Doc, Odt, Html or whatever.

Corporate types are beginning to put too much emphasis on Pdfs and seem to think they are wonderful but don't seem to notice the weird jpg distortions, swirls, wakes and random artifacts that get added when using MS Office to create the Pdf.  LibreOffice offers many options such as uncompressed or adding in accessibility features for screen-readers so that blind people can read them more easily onscreen.  Also with LibreOffice it's easier to add in clickable links and a table-of-contents that jumps to the right place (or at least i've never found a Word user that knows how to do it in Word).

The ideal combination seems to be to send a Pdf along with an editable format if you are collaborating with people and care about how it looks, especially if either you or the person at the other end (or both) is using Word and Word formats. 
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#8

Okay, I must be brain-dead. I misread "nabble" as "nobble."

Looking at nabble, it's way more than I need if anyone want's to look at the document with which I'm having trouble. It can be downloaded from http://beachware.org/Dec12.doc.

Thanks, all, for the support.
Chris

#9

Thanks.
Opens fine in my opensuse version of LO, which is I think about 3.5.4. (3.5 build 403).
steve

#10

Hi :slight_smile:
Ahhh, i think you might have missed the LibreOffice set-up that is already
built in Nabble. You just find a way into the right thread, reply to
anyone's comment, write a reply in the box and click on the "More" button
just above where you write. There is another More button so if "Upload
file" is not the top option then you've not quite reached the right place
yet.

Anyway it's all good now. I opened the file fine in 3.5.4 in Ubuntu 12.04.
Not tried it in Windows, sry.

Hmmm, page 4 only had 2 paragraphs and they were formatted a little weirdly
with 2nd and subsequent lines being indented. Best way to fix that is
probably to select the whole of the 2 paragraphs and then use the funny
triangles in the ruler at the top.

Errr, could you use Nabble or elsewhere to post a Pdf so we can see how it
should look?
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#11

Hi :slight_smile:
Ok, so i got onto a Windows machine using LO 3.5.4 and it looked the same.
In Word 2010 the couple of paragraphs from page 4 were on page 3 so page 4
started with the letter by Bill Cook. Here's a Pdf of the Word version
Dec12.pdf <http://nabble.documentfoundation.org/file/n4021634/Dec12.pdf>

It was fairly easy to kinda fix the LO issue with only 2 presses of the
backspace button (still not quite perfect but loads better) but it was 11Mb
so i gave up on uploading on my rubbishy Adsl line.
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#12

...

Opens fine for me in:
LO 3.6.3.2
Linux and Windows.

LO 3.5.4.2
Linux.

Opens in Apache OpenOffice 3.4.1 (AOO)
Linux. However right column is screwed up (blank until page 4). Crashed
AOO 3.4.1 Windows, But opened after recovery - right column screwed in
Windows version as well.

#13

And just loaded up a new LibreOffice 3.5.4.2 Windows: opens fine in that
version as well.

Recommend that you rename your LO profile and then try. If it works,
then you most likely have an issue with your profile.

#14

Chris

I had no problems opening the document us LO Version 3.6.3.2 (Build ID: 58f22d5) on Linux Mint. I noticed the pagination may be slightly off but otherwise pictures looked good and apparently in their proper places. The text did not have any funny characters or gibberish.

Jay
<snip>

#15

Thanks for looking into this. I really would like LO to become as good and better than MW.

I just copied the PDF of my document to http://beachware.org/Dec12.pdf.

Because you don't seem to have trouble loading it (at least it recognizes it as a Word document), I decided to try opening it with my Linux OpenOffice (3.2.1 build 9502). Sure enough, it opens fine there, but like you said, the columns are kind of screwy.

Thanks again,
Chris

#16

Could not open the file

LibO 3.5.7.2 XP pro / SP3

#17

I find it really frustrating that all of you are opening the document fine. Of course you all seem to be using Linux or LO version 3.6. On Nov 25, I downloaded the latest version, and it was 3.5.7. Silly me to think that this is the latest version.

So, I installed 3.6.3.2 (build 58f22d5), and it opened for me, too. I had all the column issues you had, but like you said, it's easy to fix.

Apparently, the problem I had has been fixed.

Thanks,
Chris

#18

I find it really frustrating that all of you are opening the document fine. Of course you all seem to be using Linux or LO version 3.6. On Nov 25, I downloaded the latest version, and it was 3.5.7. Silly me to think that this is the latest version.

So, I installed 3.6.3.2 (build 58f22d5), and it opened for me, too. I had all the column issues you had, but like you said, it's easy to fix.

Apparently, the problem I had has been fixed.

Thanks,
Chris

Chris

I suspect it is a regression in 3.5.7 that was fixed in the 3.6 series. Usually these problems are not OS specific but it is usually an important detail to note to run down the problem.

Jay

#19

Then I should be able to open it soon when 3.6.4 will be released. Next week???
I will give it a try because I am on XP

#20

Hi :slight_smile:
That is the OpenSource way.  Pinpoint where the problem happens, which platform, which OS, which version of LO or was it likely to be a problem with all LO everywhere!  Reduce the unknown variables until there are only a few unknowns to play around with.  As people were writing in to say they didn't have a problem they were helping reduce where the problem happened and that lead to you being able to fix it easily.

Sometimes people new to OpenSource think that type of help is a bunch of people saying "I'm alright Jack" [so get stuffed] but in fact it's just us trying to pinpoint the problem so it can be fixed.

Congrats btw.  Nicely done and welcome in :) 
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile: