HUGE Favour - File conversion

[TechMonkey]

Can anyone with a Mac to hand see if they can open the linked file and save it as a sensible format?

PGCE teacher has borrowed a Mac, edited all his files and has found they don't open here now. I can't see what he has done, they look like word files inside except for MacOSX written at the top. May be a DOCX file.

Ta muchly

Linked File - MacFile.doc

[jamesbrown]

Hi TechMonkey

I am trying to download the files and is asking for authentication?

I am using a Windows Computer but have Office 2010 so if it is docx i can save as doc.

[Norphy]

It's either a DOCX or an ODT File by the looks of it. If you rename it to a .ZIP you can see the XML inside it.

Word still can't do anything sensible with it though!

/edit the file is corrupt. Extracting it with WinRAR gets most of it but the XML files with the actual content are kaput.

[TechMonkey]

@jamesbrown : No idea why you are being asked for auth.
@Norphy: So the file is deader than a Norwegian Blue?

[Norphy]

Looks it to me, yes. I've managed to extract several XML files and others but the one with the content in and one other won't extract.

If he's using Office on a Mac, any current version of Office on Windows should be able to handle it. Same with OpenOffice/LibreOffice and I'm pretty sure that Pages (Apple's word processor built into iWork) saves files as ODF files so again, Word on Windows should be able to handle it.

[TechMonkey]

Ta. I think his Memory stick is up the duff, corrupting files, & had all ready warned him about this. Sucks to be him!!

[rad]

I tried with Open Office or the like, still no joy.

[HodgeHi]

You may be able to recover some text using the text recovery option. I managed to view rows and rows of text (a word on each line) but no formatting.

[HodgeHi]

Also did he use Office 2011 for mac to do this? If so he may need to update the Office installation. We had a problem here where any documents created in Office 2011 would not open in 2010 or any .docs in 2003 until we installed the critical update. We are now running the latest version 14.1.3 (110805). It won't help recover the docs though.