My young apprentice (who, according to the Black Queen, is spending too much time in my presence and picking up "bad habits". Pah, I say, it's all part of the training), Beta Gal, sent me a file of primer sequences yesterday. Obviously she needs more training, because the file was created in Microsoft Word. Oh well, she's still young.
Now the thing is, I've been using iWork for the last year or so. One of the many gorgeous things about the word processing and page layout component is how it handles Word documents. With the latest version (to which I treated myself last month) Pages will track changes and handle comments seamlessly between itself and Word. It consistently handles Word documents better than Microsoft Word (a pattern develops: $BOSS sent me a PowerPoint file that Microsoft PowerPoint screwed up - lost the images, formatting, completely buggered. Keynote, with the exception of ls possibly the most beautiful program I've ever used, didn't even blink).
So Beta Gal sends me a .docx file. The version of Office (2004) I'm running on this machine doesn't recognize it.
It's a sodding Word document for pity's sake. What kind of crack-brained pot-smoking monkeys are doing this to a simple text-processing file format? Even my trusty code-wrench BBEdit throws up its character sets in dispair. The only text it shows me that isn't binary gobbledegook says
[Content_Types].xml
Pages, of course, smiles sweetly and shows me what my young Padawan has been up to.
Breathe, BK; think sunny thoughts, find your happy place.
Comments
You're too patient. When people do this to me, I send it straight back and demand plain text.
Posted by: Neil | April 30, 2008 11:05 AM
That's because there's no software for Linux....
ducks
Posted by: bk | April 30, 2008 11:32 AM
How's Numbers compared to Excel?
Posted by: pw-wig | April 30, 2008 12:04 PM
Seems pretty good so far. B-G and meself have been using Numbers. We may have to club together to buy her a copy of iWork '08 (as I think the trial version must have expired by now...).
Posted by: bk | April 30, 2008 12:12 PM
That's because there's no software for Linux....
I really shouldn't rise to this :)
but...
/me opens a .docx in OpenOffice with no problems. No, software doesn't seem to be the problem.
Posted by: Neil | April 30, 2008 12:17 PM
*grin*
I think we all know what the problem is, Neil. I only keep it around to remind myself how bad things can get.
Posted by: bk | April 30, 2008 12:24 PM
FYI black knight, my iWork did expire, and although it was my first preference, both fate and my cheap nature drove me to use Word.
Beta gal. I wonder what bad habits black queen could be referring to?
Posted by: beta gal | April 30, 2008 03:26 PM
You should ask her.
Posted by: bk | April 30, 2008 05:53 PM
I wrote a presentation in Keynote and then converted to Powerpoint. I cried when I saw what it did to my beautiful work. Ahem. No, really, it absolutely stuffed it up. Keynote is superb.
Posted by: Georg | April 30, 2008 10:09 PM
ahh.. the joys of receiveing and opening files someone sent you.
My old prof used to send us - the underlings that is - files that we dreaded open since they were most likely infected with something nasty.
That said, I never hated word as much as writing my thesis and using beta, alfa and other nice greek letters when all of a sudden word decided that they all needed to be reformed into #...
I'm looking forward buying a mac ;)
Posted by: chall | May 1, 2008 04:22 AM
The reason you found only gobblydegook is due to the .docx format actually being a zipped file. Rename and open it and you will find the elements inside. At least one of the files has the text you're looking for.
Posted by: Frank | May 17, 2008 07:02 PM
Sheesh. Well that was obvious..
thanks Frank. I'll bear it in mind.
Posted by: bk | May 17, 2008 07:09 PM