[WinMac] Re: Read Word 97 (Win) files into Word 6 (Mac)

Kim Andersen(andersen[at]pu.org)
Tue, 8 Sep 1998 18:56:20 -0500

At 10:43 AM +0200 9/7/98, Jeroen Camstra <jeroenc@bigfoot.com> wrote:
>We have several Macintosh users with Word 6 and some Windows 95 users with
>Word 97. A Word document coming from a Windows user can only be read by a
>Mac user when it was saved in Word 6 format, which they always forget to do
>at first.
>
>Is there an importfilter with which I can import these Word 97 files into
>Word 6 for Mac? I couldn't find it at Microsoft's webpages. I would like
>the same for Excel 97 (PC) to Excel 5 (Mac).
>
>BTW Upgrading to Office 98 (Mac) is (for the moment) not a solution,
>because we use Dutch software and Office 98 is not available in Dutch.

There is a converter called "Word 97-98 Converter Installer" somewhere on
Microsoft's web site (and on the Office 98 CD) that you can install in Word
6 and it will read Word 97 files. It's not perfect - it gets about the same
number of errors as any word processing converter gets, like wrong page
breaks and font losses and that kind of thing. But it's better than nothing.

We use MacLinkPlus, which allows you to make an icon on your desktop that
you can drag Word 97 files onto to convert them to Word 6. Or it will do
automatic conversion if you double-click a file.

We have a copy of Office 98 for testing. So far we're not pleased - it
reads Word 6 and Word 97 files much more imperfectly than we were led to
expect. Microsoft tech support claims that this is because Office 98 uses
different printer drivers than Office 97, so of course the files look
different. So much for the supposed "cross-platform compatibility" of
Office 97 and 98.

Kim Andersen, Network Manager
Amarillo National Resource Center

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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b2 on Tue Sep 08 1998 - 17:00:40 PDT