#1
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My Word files are now stored as Mac not Windows. Need to convert!
I have an archive on a NAS drive with about a thousand Word docs on it.
They were all produced in Word for Windows from 2000-2016. Last year the NAS disc was dying and For ease I copied them to my Mac backup disc, replaced the disc and copied them back. All was well … I thought. On trying to open one on my PC this morning, Word 2016 wanted to covert it and all I could see was Mac OSX and lots of symbols. Word 2019 on the Mac opened it fine in compatibility mode. Is there any global way of addressing the problem so that the PC can recognise them as ‘Windows’ files again? Any help welcome Thanks Pete |
#2
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Word documents are Word documents, whether on a Mac or Windows.
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#3
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Mac files, when viewed on a windows machine show additional files which are not the 'real' file. You should ignore those parts which sit in folders related to .DS_Store or ResourceFork. See Dealing with Resource Forks and .DS_Store Files on non-Mac Volumes | Low End Mac. On a Mac those hidden files tell the OS what the file type is and what the icon looks like.
Windows doesn't work that way. Instead, on Windows, the filename should include a suffix like .docx which is associated with an application (like MS Word) on that machine. So look for the actual files (which may or may not have the correct file suffix on them). You should be able to identify the actual files by their file size. If you know what the file type should be, you can add the suffix by renaming the file and then simply double-click on it.
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Andrew Lockton Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia |
#4
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Thanks Guys.
I’ve found the problem. The particular set of documents I was looking at have become re-named. They were in a format “minutes-04-10-27.doc”. Somewhere in the transfer they have become “minutes.04.10.27”. Because of the full stops, Windows doesn’t recognise them as word documents. It may be that the file transfer has messed something else up. I dug out my secondary backup and that’s OK so I’ll copy that back to the master.. |
#5
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A file named 'minutes-04-10-27' wouldn't change to 'minutes.04.10.27' when moving from a Mac to a PC. The implication, therefore, is that the periods were there all along. You really shouldn't use periods in filenames - they should only be used to differentiate the filename from the extension. The use of periods in filenames was at one time a common malware exploit, used to hide the the types of files the malware really were.
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Cheers, Paul Edstein [Fmr MS MVP - Word] |
#6
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Quote:
I’ve been writing and saving minutes files and many other MS Office files for over 20 years. I’ve never used periods in a file name, just underscores or hyphens. If I remember correctly, MS Word will not save a file with a period in an unexpected place in the file name. Thank you for your concern, but I’m genuinely not that foolish. I will however run a malware check across that NAS drive for safety, though it is only ever on for 3 hours each day. |
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