Craig Box's journeys, stories and notes...

Posts Tagged ‘office’

A more pragmatic, but less common, question about Office Open XML

Sunday, January 25th, 2009

Geek question.

Assume people collaborate using Microsoft Office documents around (probably by e-mail, but that's another discussion).  

The "97-2003" formats are closed, binary formats, but well readable by applications such as OpenOffice.org, and now documented by their author (albeit under a specification that the GPL people can't yet get behind).    The 2007 format is more interoperable in the sense it's XML and (mostly) documented and went through an infamous "standardization" process, but is still not widely accepted. I would rather see ODF succeed — potentially with patent-free extensions from Microsoft to allow it to support all the features of Microsoft Office — as the 'standard XML document format'.  

Now we've got all that aside, I prefer .doc to .docx, and it's nothing to do with any of that - it's purely pragmatic, with respect to users of previous versions of Office.

Office 2003 and 2007, side by side.

I believe that in the team I work in, maybe 2/3 are on Office 2003 and the other 1/3 are on Office 2007.  Our customers, being that we deal with very large companies, are overwhelmingly all still on Office 2003.  (Personally, I'd rather send a PDF to a customer than a DOC, but that's not a decision I can make company-wide.)

I have the converter pack installed, which makes my Office 2003 installation compatible with Office 2007 documents (though it does prompt me and say that some features may be lost in translation).  I can't assume that everyone does, however, so OOXML files inconvenience anyone who gets sent these documents that does not have the converter installed.  The argument could also be made that PDF files inconvenience people without a PDF reader: everyone just downloads one, so what?

By way of opinions placed in the comments, should I be encouraging colleagues who send me documents in Office 2007 format, to enable saving by default in Office 2003 format?

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Posted in Technical, Work | 2 Comments »

Searching and replacing attached templates in Word documents

Monday, March 19th, 2007

If you have a document take 5-15 seconds at "Requesting virus scan..." in Microsoft Word, you will think "Pesky virus scanner!". But while this fault is most commonly Norton AntiVirus, it can also manifest in another circumstance: where you have a document with an attached template on a share you can't access any more.

If you are a Windows tech, you have no excuse for not knowing about Sysinternal's Filemon - when you know exactly what an application is accessing, it lets you solve a multitude of problems, including this one. We have a customer with an application that generates Word files based on a template, in the same location as the program is being run from. Long before our involvement they appear to have had a server named "Server" (imaginitive naming) and ran the program from \\Server\Share. There is no Server any more, so the documents from that period all cause a timeout trying to find a share that doesn't exist.
Thankfully, when their current server was installed, a drive mapping was created, so all the documents from that point on are attached to a template on G:\. Therefore the task becomes to search-and-replace the template on all the old Word documents.

There is no easier way to do this than using Word's VBA, which is unfortunate, as you have to script a load of each document, which means each one takes 5-15 seconds to process. There are third party utilities I've seen that handle Word automation, but you may as well just run a macro, which appears in its full splendour below the fold.

I'd be interested to know if there was a library that let you edit Word documents, so we could do this by another method.

Net result however, documents now open speedy, and customer is happy.

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Posted in Technical, Work | No Comments »