Please, don’t send me your Office-beta-created documents
In the past couple of weeks I’ve received some copy from freelances with the mysterious suffix “.docx”. Uh? What’s that? I thought it would be a normal document - you know, the sort of thing that Word would open. (Because you know how much I love Word’s quirks. Ah, I still delight in its refusal to open RTF files that it hasn’t created.)
But - no dice. It won’t open them, or if it does, it finds junk: ticks and umlauts and so on, as if I’d tried to open an image as a document.
So what’s going on? Turns out that people have been downloading the Microsoft Office 2007 Beta, which has gaily taken over their machines and begun churning out their documents in this non-compatible XML format which no XML parser in my reach can, uh, parse.
Kind of an own goal there, guys - both Microsoft guys and writer guys. I don’t see that Microsoft can honestly believe that we’re all going to rush to upgrade to Office 2007 just because a few people running the beta have produced documents in it. Time for a downgrade - if it’ll let you. (I’ve had people saying it’s crashed horribly on them.)
- These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
- Why??? Why does Word show the same size of font in different sizes between documents??? (updated) (12 January 2006; score: 50.44%)
- You want to email me? Here's the chicane you have to beat (19 August 2004; score: 42.87%)
- Pieces fall into place for Apple to launch "iWork" next week (4 January 2005; score: 39.89%)
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July 26th, 2006 at 6:54 pm
I’m finding the Office 2007 beta a very good experience. It’s certainly a big step up from Office 2003. The .docx, .xlsx, .pptx etc formats are clearly a problem for sharing, but it’s very easy to save as Office 2003 documents (the title even tells you it is in “compatibility mode”). I’d think writers for your section would be able to negotiate around these sorts of twiddles.
Looking at some of the technical documentation, it seems .docx is really a zipped XML file. Not sure what use that is, but it must mean something to someone.
I used OpenOffice for a while and no one could read .odt documents either. The problems of the bleeding edge…
July 28th, 2006 at 3:16 pm
Charles, we’ve done a lot of good work in this area as you can read about on our beta site here: http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/beta/converter.mspx
We have a converter add-in for Office 2000 and above which enables you to read and write to the new formats.
Why not join in and become a beta tester for the converter and help us get it right? :)
Darren
July 28th, 2006 at 4:07 pm
Ah, Darren, ever the optimist, in a nice way. And it’s nice to know you’re reading.
Two points:
1) the converter is for Windows. I ain’t using Windows, neither at home or work. (And what’s with all the “Verify your copy of Windows” stuff on the page you linked to? I feel like a crim just reading it.)
2) can’t really be a beta tester because of (1). I’m actually starting to find that VoodooPad does lots of the word processing functions I need (which aren’t many; Word is massive overkill in so many departments for me) plus a lot more I hadn’t thought of. And I suspect that any critique that I had of the Office beta wouldn’t actually change the fundamentals. Supertankers and courses..
Meanwhile Word (on the Mac) wanted to do a 58MB download the other day to protect against vulnerabilities in Powerpoint (ohh…kay..) but still won’t read RTF documents created by other programs. To me, that’s odd. I think I blogged about the update that tweaked it beyond recovery a while back. But no indication of where to put the bug report..
July 28th, 2006 at 6:45 pm
Well you know I like to try and provide positive outlets for your frustrations Charles :-)
There will be a similar pack for mac later on and the next mac Office is to include it but the current beta is just for pc thats true. As it happens I was testing this out this week anyway so I posted a few screen shots of it on OfficeRocker. http://blogs.msdn.com/officerocker/archive/2006/07/28/681684.aspx
I’m coming to your talk on Monday by the way so I suppose I can expect more Microsoft bashing from you :-) Have a good weekend and see you then.
cheers D.
August 7th, 2006 at 11:24 am
Why don’t you just let us go back to sending you copy as plain text inside an email message, Charles? Much easier. And Look, Ma, no junk!
wg
August 13th, 2006 at 9:55 pm
Wendy - because plain text that contains any high ASCII bits (like accents or lots of stuff created on Windows and then passed through an email system) gets mangled - dashes become something like %5 and double quotes become something else (particularly “opening” double quotes and “closing” double quotes). Plus line endings then get turned into return characters, which makes things hellish if the writer doesn’t put a line space after each paragraph (you can’t work out where their real paragraphs begin or end).
Sure, you can sort it all with search + replace, but it’s a bore. I would write a macro to do it but Word’s macro dictionary is a right pain.
That’s why :-)