I have some doc files on my website. Right now I’m using someone’s Mac to check on the site, and notice that this computer can not open those files.
I looked at one of the files in Google Docs to see if that would at least show the text, and it does show the text, but with almost no formatting. Most importantly, the footnotes (the main point of their existence on my site involves the footnotes) are now endnotes instead of footnotes. (When the file is viewed in Google Docs I mean.)
So my question is, is there an easy way to convert these .doc files into some format easily readable by people who don’t have Microsoft Word, where the conversion leaves in place footnote formatting, and where the conversion also leaves color coding intact?
Why don’t you convert them to something like Open Office or Google Docs and resave them? That would still mean the Mac user would need to take some steps to read the documents (possibly requiring software installation).
Is it possible to convert the document to HTML (Word has some save-as functionality, I’m pretty sure it works well for basically formatted documents). You’re already taking up online storage space for the documents, this would just be in a different form.
Perhaps this is too easy an answer, but why not print them to PDF?
That way everything format related is correct. You would have a hard time editing the PDF (not impossible but harder), but if your goal is to just read them, a PDF would work.
Since you specify making your documents available to people who don’t have Word, that pretty much restricts you to PDF or RTF.
Yes, this may be what you want. RTF will preserve color coding and footnotes (I just checked), though I’m not sure whether every program would interpret them correctly.
If the question rephrased is, “I don’t have Microsoft Office/Word and want an easy way to read Word documents – and perhaps edit them,” then Open Office is the solution. It’s a free (though somewhat large) download which will read and write .doc files – though its “native” form at is .odt and one must remember to save in .doc (or .rtf, .txt., etc.) if sending to someone without Open Office. Main page for Open Office.org’s website
The lingua franca of the Web for formatted documents is currently PDF, hands down. Readers exist for basically every platform.
It’s not just Mac users who can’t open Word documents: neither can Linux users, many mobile phone users (a big problem outside the US, where the standard web browser is often a cell phone), folks with an older version of Windows and/or Word, and PC users who don’t use Office at all (although WordPad can read some of them).
Another solution is to use Word to export those documents to HTML. If you don’t like what it does with the footnotes, you can tweak the resulting HTML
One would think so, but a student tried turning something in to me in RTF last semester, and it didn’t work. It looks like Microsoft has invented their own format incomprehensible to everyone else that they’re calling RTF, even though it isn’t.
Those who wish to pursue reading, editing, and creating word .docs on a Mac would be well-advised to look at NeoOffice. Unlike OpenOffice, it’s native to the MacOS, and thus avoids the horrible kludginess of running OpenOffice on X11.
Thanks for the helpful replies, everyone. I’ll look into RTF and PDF. (Not at my home computer right now–does Word have a way to save directly to PDF?)
In response to a couple of your comments: Yes, I know that not only Mac users don’t have Word. Read the title to the OP again, please. Also, if you have a spare minute, read the OP more carefully.
(Everytime I assume no one will assume I’m an idiot, it turns out I assumed wrong, which I guess proves my idiocy…)
I may be misremembering, as I stick to The Google for the few office-type docs I use, but I think the latest OpenOffice did away with the X11 requirement.
