Open compound document made by Works and Word

[JoriMäntysalo]

I was asked about some old documents. Here is one example: http://www.sis.uta.fi/~jm58660/libreoffice-not-open.doc

It is made on a Windows computer by MS Works, Word or both in 2006, but the versions used may have been much older. It should contain text and probably a picture. The text is in Finnish and is written for “As. Oy. Järvensivu hallitus”, so may contain something like “As. Oy. Järvensivun hallitukselle”. The .doc extension is from the original file name.

file command says “Composite Document File V2 Document, Can’t read SSAT”, so is it broken? If not, can at least the text be read? LibreOffice seems to open it as a some kind of binary string.

[Radish]

I downloaded and tried to open your file with these results:

Microsoft Office 2003: “The file is corrupt or damaged”.

Open Office 4.1.3: “General Error” and “General Input/Output Error”

Personally I suspect that the file I downloaded is corrupt in some way. (I have no idea if the file you have on your computer is itself corrupt.)

You could try the following:

1. Make two copies of the file. Name one of the copies “libreoffice-not-open.wps” (this would be the file extension for a Microsoft Works document file). Name the other copy “libreoffice-not-open.doc” (this you already have, and that would be the file extension for a Microsoft Office document - at least for Word 2003).

2. Try converting the two files made here: http://www.zamzar.com The site doesn’t just do video conversations. Look at the Step 2 options in the drop-down menu and you will see that it can convert files to “odt”.

You could also try posting your problem at this forum: https://forum.openoffice.org/en/forum There are some experts there in LibreOffice and OpenOffice that might be happy to have a go at opening your file. (Personally, I find that forum much easier to use for LibreOffice and OpenOffice problems - it’s more user friendly than this Ask LibreOffice forum.)

Personally I think the file is corrupt but the above is worth a try.

Good luck with it. And, Happy New Year!

[anon87010807]

I had a go at it as well. Word Viewer can’t make sense of it, neither can Libre or OpenOffice. It begins correctly with the “magic numbers”, so the start suggests th\t it was a legitimate Word file. But the rest is a mess of garbled characters, maybe that’s the graphic part, but I suspect that the file got truncated or something like that.

[rautamiekka]

It’s a classic example of corrupted and most likely truncated DOC. LO wouldn’t open it in Writer as a bunch of binary text if the syntax at least started+ended correctly.

[JoriMäntysalo]

Zamzar did not help, neither renaming to .wps. I asked for a few more example files. I am quite sure that file has not been corrupted when sent as email attachment to me, as other files have no problems.

[anon87010807]

Unencrypted word files were a mix of formatting code and document text. In principle, if a document got corrupted, you could, if it could still be opened, scavenge much of the content from it. I saved a small test file today with the text “This is a test” as doc and opened that in Notepad. Near the end of the file the text “T h i s i s a t e s t” duly showed up. Your file has nothing like that. If that’s what you got, it was probably already corrupted on the sender’s side.

[JoriMäntysalo]

Got more files. At least one start with 90 cf 11 e0 a1 b1 1a e1, i.e. like Word file but starting D0 changed to 90. That is exactly one bit corruption. Very strange. But after chagning that byte it still does not open.