MS Office (Home Edition) - Word scrambled formats

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Level 1

6 points

MS Office (Home Edition) - Word scrambled formats

Has anyone else encountered problems where an MS Office for MAC Word document (.doc format, not .docx) sent as an email attachment can't be read by a recipient whose computer uses a MS Operating System and MS Word? Formats are scrambled or removed.

If so, has anyone found a way around the problem - short of getting their money back on their MAC and buying a computer that uses a MS Operating System?

iMac 20", Mac OS X (10.5.6)

Posted on Jun 28, 2009 4:28 AM

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Answer 1

Jun 28, 2009 6:02 PM in response to Nojay

Please post Office related questions on Microsoft''s own forums for Office:Mac as Apple discussions only provide support for Apple products:

http://www.officeformac.com/productforums

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Answer 2

etresoft

Level 9

56,692 points

Jun 28, 2009 6:25 PM in response to Nojay

Your problem almost certainly has nothing to do with Word. Either:
1) your e-mail attachment is getting scrambled somehow
2) your recipient can't or doesn't know how to read the attachment.

What e-mail system is said recipient using? What e-mail system are you using? If you are using Apple Mail, did you make sure to set the "Windows compatible flag" when you attached the file?

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Answer 3

Nojay Author

Level 1

6 points

Jun 30, 2009 3:22 PM in response to etresoft

Thanks for your comments but I have since found the solution by re-sending attachments in various ways. (Sending the documents as Adobe PDF's did not work either).

The solution turns out to be:

Any attachment has to have the extension to the file name visible, not hidden (which my MAC does as a default).
I have definitely given up using Pages. Pages formats are scrambled by anyone using MS Word - and vice versa.
I've had no further problems using MS Word for MAC (so far).
I'm still left with the task of converting my Pages documents into MS Word documents. No small task and yet another annoyance I have with APPLE whose sales teams insists on maintaining the corporate line that MAC and MS now talk to each other. Wrong.

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Answer 4

Nojay Author

Level 1

6 points

Jun 30, 2009 3:28 PM in response to Templeton Peck

Thanks for the advice however I have since found that the solution is to make sure that any document is saved with the extension (.doc etc) visible before they are attached to outgoing emails. My MAC saves document without the extension visible as a default.

MAC might be able to read them without the extension but, in my case at least, the recipient using MW software could not. Once the extension was added there was no problem.

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