Transferring Files from a Mac to a WIN10

Factual Questions
1

I feel dumb.

My Mac died a couple of months ago. I sent it into the shop and bought a Windows 10 machine. When the Mac came back, I used a USB to move a slew of Word files from the old machine to the new one.

Months went by. I still have both machines thank goodness.

I just now tried to open some of the Word files on the new machine. I clicked on the icon. I got a scary message saying Word could not open the file. Click here if you trust the source of the file. I click. I wait.

The file opens, but it is mostly just a collection of squares and stuff, not one word of the original file.

Since I still have both machines, how ought I to proceed?

2

You definitely have Word installed on the PC? (not just Wordpad or something else)?

Open one of them in Word on the old machine and then ‘Save As’ - this ought to tell you what format they were saved in.

My guess is something other than Word ‘doc’ or ‘docx’ format - and that Windows is confused just because there’s no file extension - file extensions in Windows tend to tell the OS what application to open a file with, and tell the application what to expect - whereas they’re pretty irrelevant and often absent on a Mac.

3

First off, I repeated the preceding procedure. I used a USB to move the files, and again I got unreadable files.

But, I just clipped a few paragraphs I needed on a document on the Mac. I then e-mailed the the clipping to myself. I then opened it on the Windows machine perfectly.

Yes, I have checked, I am running Word.

4

This does sound like you don’t have Word (or a sufficiently recent version of Word) on the new PC or that the association of Word files on the new PC is incorrect.

There’s a very easy test you can do: open Word on your PC and from within Word, open the files.

5

This is very likely a MS Word compatibility problem, not a case of files being corrupted in transit.

Please post the versions of Word you are using on both Mac and Windows.

Although Microsoft makes both pieces of software, the MS Word file format is a maze of complication that has emerged over decades, and the two versions do not necessarily work exactly the same.

You probably do not have to buy a new version of Word. Even if you have an old version of Word on Windows, MS provides free patches to update many old versions so they can read files created by newer versions. Linky.

6

You can probably save the files as a simpler format such as RTF that will work correctly on both machines, and you can almost certainly save them as TXT if you don’t have any formatting that you need to preserve. You might also be able to save them in an older Word format, which will maintain almost all of the formatting, unless you use the new features a lot.

7

I have been able to e-mail myself a number of complex Word files form the Mac to the PC. All have made the transit with all the formatting intact.

How can I tell what version of Word I am running?

8

As others have alluded to, does the file name end with .doc or .docx? Try renaming the file and specifically add this extension, and try again.

Millions of us quite literally have no problem working cross-platform, so it’s likely something very elementary.

Although… modern macOS has long abandoned type and creator codes; I’m not even sure that Office tries to use them. I’d suspect that the extension is required, even on Mac. I just tried removing the extension from a Word file, and now it’s unrecognized, so I think type/creator aren’t used. This is one of those sad states of affairs that Windows actually won.

9

One example of a file that will not open properly is:

._75 Ways to Be Unhappy

The “._” is obviously wrong. All the mess-up files seem to have this prefix. Should I add a suffix too?

10

Well, starting with a . is the way Unix flags that a file should be hidden… does Mac do this also? Perhaps it’s a temporary of auxiliary file?" Can you find a different version of the same filename without the ._?

11

I tried to remove the “._” but was told another file has that name in the same location. I cannot easily find that other file.

12

Googling around about “Microsoft Office Mac dot underscore file” points me to a surprisingly helpful StackExchange answer:

OK, that’s a lot of technobabble, but it boils down to this: “._75 Ways whatever.docx” is not your document. It’s a file containing system-level metadata that would normally be invisible on a Macintosh. You’ve somewhat proven to yourself that this file is redundant: as you say, if you remove the “dot underscore” prefix, the system tells you that file already exists. The file which already exists is your actual Word document.

Why you can’t find it is the real problem, it seems to me. You may just be overlooking it, or it may have the Microsoft NTFS “hidden” attribute turned on for some reason. There is a way to make the File Explorer show you hidden files.

ETA: As to not having a filename suffix visible, that’s another “helpful” File Explorer default setting, “hide extensions for known file types”. :rolleyes: The suffix is probably “.docx” and both the real document and the “dot underscore” metadatafile should have them. Just not visible, because Microsoft think that’s too complicated for its normal users. :rolleyes: :rolleyes: You can also turn this abomination of anoption off in the Explorer.

13

OK, you are right (and thank you). Each file has a real file (that opens perfectly) and a shadow file that does nothing obviously useful .

Let me play around with hiding the hidden files with “Explorer” (which is the file window, not Internet Explorer, right?).

14

My goodness, that worked! I did it! I opened “view” and told File Explorer to hide files I need not see. Now I can find my stuff easily. Thank you so much.