[WinMac] Re: cross-platform and MS Word

dhaslehurst@home.com
Sat, 18 Sep 1999 22:13:20 -0500

I taught Microsoft Word 98 in Mac and WinNT labs last year. For what
its worth, here are some of my observations.

I would not risk using Word 5.1 on the Macs if the files were going
to be opened using Word 97 with Windows. I have had very good
success with students saving Word98 files for use with Word97 and
vise versa, the trick was to make sure the Word98 file ends with
".doc" (without the quotes).

I found that some very strange problems occurred in cross platform
situations. The department that hired me to teach the course had
several virus infected Macs available for the students to use (not in
the lab I was teaching in). It was a problem, a big problem. I
found that if a file was infected by a virus on a Mac and then opened
on a PC strange things happened and sometimes irreversible file
damage occurred. I spent many hours at home using Norton on both
platforms to rescue files (unpaid hours I might add!!!). I was only
teaching a few hours a week on a short contract, so I did not get an
opportunity to follow through with the department, the guy who set
the Macs up for the students knew there was a virus but had decided
that it didn't really matter (hey, it was only my unpaid time he was
wasting).
In addition, problems arose when students used damaged PC disks to
save files on the Mac.
I suspect that some of the PC disks were infected by PC viruses
before the students tried to save files from the Mac.
Some weeks were pretty wild!

Hope something here is of use.
Donna

>However, this week four of my students -- one in one section and
>three in another section of the course, each student working at a
>different computer have experienced the same problem -- after saving
>their word document to a pc disk - the document refused to open --
>when we attempt to open the document in Microsoft Word 5.1, we
>either get an error message that says "not enough memory"... or
>Word 5.1 just grinds way until we have to force quit. If we try to
>open the document in Word98, the error message "this is not a word
>document" appears...
>
>I have put the document through MacLink Plus in an attempt to
>translate whatever may have happened into either Mord 5.1 or
>Word98.... and in one or two cases I've been able to recover the
>text (but no formatting or graphics)... in one (and only one) other
>case, I was able to translate a document into Word 5.1 with all the
>formatting (styles, tables, and graphics) still embedded in the
>document....

Donna Haslehurst
dhaslehurst@home.com

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