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Friday, January 27, 2012

Reading Microsoft Word For Dos into Word 2010 - Not easy

I have a document written in the old Microsoft Word For Dos file format.  I even have the style sheet used when the document was created.  (I do not know if Word embedded the style sheet information in the document files in those days.)

SOLUTION
The solution was to load up word95.  See below

 Word 2010 manages to read in the text but no formatting whatsoever.
 This is what it should look like.
After much searching on the net, I found Avanstar Quick View Plus.
This did a reasonable job.  It got the look reasonable in terms of font size / bold etc but the characters are all "style0".

The page breaks and footers are lost though.  And the table that should be at the bottom of page 1 shows up at the top.  But it's uasable.



In the end, the help came from Microsoft themselves.  Had Megan's old Toshiba windows 95 laptop in the junk box.  Powered it up and it booted although warning me along the way that the battery had failed and the date was wrong.

This laptop has no ethernet port and no wifi.  Remember the days of the PCMCIA ethernet port.  Well that was long gone and I was not about to try to go down that path.  And look at that little green thingy in the middle of the keyboard.  That's the mouse for you youngies!

So I copied my word file onto a floppy (using a USB floppy drive) and took it over.

Unfortunately it had office 2000 installed.  Amazingly the Toshiba read the floppy but it could not load the Word for Dos file.  I had come prepared though with a copy of office 95.  -> Quickly installed Word95 (Custom with all options).

Now it read the file and asked for REPORT.STY which I had thoughtfully copied onto the floppy.  Then it wanted some PLT files.  Ejected floppy.  Back to the modern world and copied the PLT files onto the floppy.  Back in time to 1995 and did it all again.  It all worked.  Saved in word95 format.  How come no docx option I wonder.  :).

Word 2010 initially opened the newly created Word95 file in "protected mode".  Had to change permissions before it would let me edit or save.  Now the document is complete save for the logo on page 1 which I could not find.  All the internal drawings are embedded and it's in docx format which will hopefully serve us for another 15 years.

I wonder if I should create a VM (Virtual Machine) with Word 95.  What OS?  Win 95 or XP?
We will leave that until we need to do that all again.


If you know a other solutions feel free to suggest by way of a comment.  I wonder if this laptop will still be around next time I need to do this.
Programs:
Avanstar Quick View Plus $US49
file-convert.com
These guys also have an online conversion process starting at $15MOQ and totalling $1 per 50k.
File Merlin $US99
This is a stand alone app but when I tried to open the file it created, the computer brought up a warning "Protected View - Office has detected a problem with file.  Editing it may harm your computer...."
Inside the line spacing was wrong.  Formatting not as good as the Avanstar program.  Gave up.

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