MS Word Document vs. Abiword & Open Office

[gens]

Hello guys...
I'm having a problem with an archive called poetry.doc. Like you can imagine, this is a personal file, created in MS Word but opened and modified many times with Abiword/OoWriter. Beside this, ultimately the archive doesn't open in these programs. I've verified if the archive is not corrupted (going to a machine with Windows... :S) and fortunately it's not. If it's relevant, it's the only archive I have that exceeds the 200 pages...
In fact, Abiword and OoWriter works fine with all the other documents I have...
Can anybody help me with this problem??
_________________
Still in love with Gentoo...

AMDK6 II
196 MB RAM
SiS 530...
Oh, damn!!!

[psychomunky]

I was just reading a thing on slashdot that mentioned something about this. This is now the second time in a week that I have heard of a problem with some MS Office compliant apps crapping out on large documents. I guess that is what we get when large corporations keep their fsckin' document formats closed and those of us who use "their" (the big vendor's) unsupported platforms loose out. Chalk another one up for why we need open standards.

Anyways, enough ranting, here are a few things I would try:

- First, make certain that the .doc file wasn't actually saved from wordpad originally...those .doc are not the same as word .doc (although Word can still read and edit them and Wordpad can do the same to a degree).

- Secondly, though I am not certain where the Office comapatibility in Abiword and OOo stand, I would make sure that you svae this .doc as Office 2000 compliant or lower. The older doc formats seem to have a little better support, because we've seen more of them.

- Try saving the document as an .rtf instead. It is a bit more open as far as the format goes, but you may lose some formatting.

- Try Anti-word, kword...one of them might be able to read the document.

- Check out a trial of softmaker office from http://www.softmaker.com/english/.

- If you have a google account tryout http://docs.google.com...it may be able to convert your doc to a format usable by OOo or Abi.

Here is where I originally heard about the whole office compatilibility thing I mentioned at the beginning of this post: http://bsd.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/18/2234243

[gens]

Well... I was suposing that and I dind't want to believe it, but yes.. I think that IT'S a private format problem. That's veeeeeeeeeeery sad. However, let's keep us on the problem:

- The doc file was fully created with MS Word and never edited with Wordpad. Especifically, it was created with MS Word 2000... so I think this can be a recent-introduction... "lock"... maybe I've edited it recently in a 2003 version... I don't remember...

- I wil try to save it in a lower format. I was saving in 2000 compliant but I'll try even lower.

- .RTF... sounds like it can works. Not so practic, but works.

- Of course!! The google source... Why the hell I didn't think on it?? Damn! ¬¬...

Thanks for the ideas, I will take it...
And well... If anyone have problems like this, please say it!! We must see what's really happening here!
_________________
Still in love with Gentoo...

AMDK6 II
196 MB RAM
SiS 530...
Oh, damn!!!