Tech: help me save my dulcimer list?

Subject: Tech: help me save my dulcimer list?
From: GUEST,leeneia
Date: 03 Apr 06 - 02:50 PM

This week I had to replace my motherboard and change from Windows 98 to Windows XP Home. The computer shop backed up my data for me, and one valuable item is my list of songs to play on the dulcimer. When I check its properties, my computer says that it is still a WordPad document.

However, when I start WordPad and tell it to open my dulcimer list, it refuses to do it, claiming that it cannot open Word for Windows 6.0 files. Likely story!


It would take a lot of typing to re-create that list, which is 25 kb. My husband has a sophisticated system at work. Maybe his computer could do something to transmogrify the document. Any suggestions?
---------
PS For you other mtn dulcimer players - I have just worked out how to play Jeremiah Clark's trumpet voluntary on it. Try it, it's fun.

Subject: RE: Tech: help me save my dulcimer list?
From: Bert
Date: 03 Apr 06 - 03:05 PM

Send it to me as an email attachment leenia and I'll see what I can do with it.

[e-mail]

Subject: RE: Tech: help me save my dulcimer list?
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 03 Apr 06 - 03:05 PM

Instead of trying WordPad or Word, see if you can open it in Notepad. It will lose any diacriticals and italics and such, but the basics should be there.

And you should strongly consider upgrading to Windows XP Professional. It's a lot more robust than the home version.

Good luck!

SRS

Subject: RE: Tech: help me save my dulcimer list?
From: Bert
Date: 03 Apr 06 - 03:31 PM

Word is notoriously incompatible over versions.

Never ever, keep an important file in Word format without also keeping a .txt version.

Subject: RE: Tech: help me save my dulcimer list?
From: fiddler
Date: 03 Apr 06 - 04:23 PM

Well Bert had the right idea, If he doesn't succeed send it to me and I'll oput my boys on it as a challenge

[e-mail]

Subject: RE: Tech: help me save my dulcimer list?
From: Geoff the Duck
Date: 03 Apr 06 - 04:36 PM

I would start by downloading and instaling OpenOffice.org BLICKY
It is a free programme. It is pretty good at loading documents created by MS Word.
If it loads it, then you can look at options for saving the document - it may even put it into a format your latest copy of Word will open.
Quack!
GtD.

Subject: RE: Tech: help me save my dulcimer list?
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 03 Apr 06 - 04:57 PM

WordPad and Notepad are both plain text file editors. Neither of them is likely to do a decent job of opening a Word document of any kind. Neither of them actually is likely to be too accurate about even identifying the filetype for anything containing non-alpha characters.

If, by chance, you got a new Works or Word with your new WinXP setup, it's unlikely to be Word 6.0, but a Word 6.0 file should be easilty importable into any later Word version. Word 6, IIRC, was the first Windows version of Word, and it did use a somewhat different file format than more recent versions.

Recent versions of Works include Word 2000, and it is (reported to be) the full Word version. Recent common Office versions run from about Word 2000 thru Word 2003 or later. All versions should be able to open files from all other versions, but you may need to install an import filter for the specific combination you have to deal with. When you install a recent office version, it should ask if you want to install a whole bunch of such import/export patches, but many people don't put them all on. Fewer filters may be included with Works than with Office.

Check out the Office Downloads site and look for an appropriate import filter for your new Word version, and the file should open easily. Among other possibles, there's an "Office Converter Pack" under "Popular Downloads" there; but whether it's useful to you will depend on what programs you currently have installed to bring your old doc into.

If you don't have any version of Word on your new setup, you probably can still install Word 6.0 on WinXP (if you have the disks?), if you open Properties on the .exe file and set "Run As Win98." Word 6.0 installation, according to vague long-ago recollection, doesn't actually require any Registry info to be able to run, so you may (or may not) be able to just copy the Word 6 program files to your new installation and get it open long enough to open your file and do a save as text. (No guarantees that Word 6 will run properly if just copied and not installed, but I think I did it once. If I did, it was at least 15 years ago.)

John

Subject: RE: Tech: help me save my dulcimer list?
From: GUEST,leeneia
Date: 03 Apr 06 - 06:07 PM

"WordPad and Notepad are both plain text file editors. Neither of them is likely to do a decent job of opening a Word document of any kind."

But, but, the original document was typed to and saved by WordPad itself. I have never owned Word.

Hell, I think the best word-processing program ever was WordPerfect.

Now let me go back over all the suggestions above.

Subject: RE: Tech: help me save my dulcimer list?
From: GUEST,leeneia
Date: 03 Apr 06 - 06:16 PM

...I have never owned Word and I don't want to own it now.

Strange new problem, John. I clicked on your clicky, and the Office Downloads page you recommended comes up so huge that I can't deal with it. Letters are 1.5 inches high, and only a few of them fit on the screen at one time.

My screen display is merely Windows Classic, so why the huge type? This also happened at Travelocity.com.

Subject: RE: Tech: help me save my dulcimer list?
From: Bert
Date: 03 Apr 06 - 06:16 PM

Recent versions of Notepad will open it but you will see a little box for every non printable character.

A program to extract text from any file shouldn't be too difficult to write.

The logic would go something like...

open the file for binary read
open a file for text write
get a line of input
while not end of file
step through the input line by chracter
if it's a space write it to the text file
if it's >= ! and <= ~ write it to the text file
get another line of input

Subject: RE: Tech: help me save my dulcimer list?
From: GUEST,leeneia
Date: 03 Apr 06 - 06:37 PM

Bert and SRS: Notepad couldn't open it. It's looking for .txt files.

I'm going to send it to fiddler and let him fiddle with it.

Thanks to Geoff and John for the sites, but I hesitate to download anything onto my "upgraded" computer when I'm not familiar with it yet. Yesterday every attempt to type my password brought up the Search scrren, and a man's voice kept reading the dialog boxes to me. Finally I turned it off to cool its fevered brow.

Subject: RE: Tech: help me save my dulcimer list?
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 03 Apr 06 - 06:42 PM

There used to be a program called something like Word Reader that would at least let you see Word files even if you didn't have the program. But that isn't needed here since you're not trying to open Word, even an ancient version of it.

Notepad is a more basic program than WordPad, and should be able to read the contents just fine, with the notation (as mentioned above) that those little boxes will appear for unrecognized symbols.

Have you considered uninstalling and reinstalling your WordPad software? That might help.

SRS

Subject: RE: Tech: help me save my dulcimer list?
From: Mudlark
Date: 04 Apr 06 - 12:28 AM

I had the same problem when I switched to new iMac w/OS10. None of my OS9 documents would open w/o a great deal off futzing around. Amos came up with an elegant solution....I just have to rename the file with convention used by current WP. I.E., rename What is Art (old fild name) What is Ark.cwk (new convention). When I do this a window appears asking me if I want to rename the file. I click yes, then when I open, another window tells me file has been renamed....and it opens just fine.

Have no idea if WP stuff might work the same but it's easy to try, anyway.

Subject: RE: Tech: help me save my dulcimer list?
From: GUEST,DonMeixner
Date: 04 Apr 06 - 01:11 AM

I agree Leeneia Wordperfect is by far a superior program as far as I am concerned. I use it for all my personal processing.

Don

Subject: RE: Tech: help me save my dulcimer list?
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 04 Apr 06 - 10:27 AM

WordPerfect is much closer in function to the old WordStar software. They made a bad move with a "lite" version at one point or they might have kept market share.

SRS

Subject: RE: Tech: help me save my dulcimer list?
From: GUEST,leeneia
Date: 04 Apr 06 - 11:27 AM

Help has arrived from abroad! This morning several versions of the list arrived from Fiddler, and one of them fits the bill perfectly. (There were 165 songs on the list.)

Don Meixner: I tried to keep using WordPerfect 5.1, but no modern printer could print the documents. What version are you using?

Once I bought a new-fangled WordPerfect 8 at Office Depot, but it was all menus and mousies, and it was miserable to use. I won't be loading it into my new machine.

Thanks for all the suggestions, everyone.

Subject: RE: Tech: help me save my dulcimer list?
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 04 Apr 06 - 12:14 PM

leenia -

If your visit to the Office site produced very large text displays, and especially if your computer is "talking to you," and reading screen text, someone may have turned on one or more of the "accessibility aids" in your new WinXP. Once these options are turned on, there are numerous "Quick Keys" for turning strange things on/off that could be used inadvertently.

Start|Help, select "Index" at the top, type "Accessibility" in the search box, and hit Enter or click Display for some info on these options. (For detailed info, you may have to consult the Microsoft Knowledge Base for specialized info.)

You may also just need to adjust settings in your browser. If you happen to be using Internet Explorer, the next time the oversized type appears, try clicking "View" on the top bar, select "Text Size" and set it to a medium or smaller size.

It has taken 14 posts to reveal unambiguously that the original files were composed and saved in WordPad and that you're using classic view in WinXP Home.

We do not yet know what file extension(s) appear(s) on the file your are trying to open.

We do not yet know what browser you are using.

We do finally know that you do not have Word installed on your new computer.

We suspect, but do not know (for sure) that you never had Word installed on your Win98 computer, which might have indicated that someone had opened your file in Word 6. Or whether you (or someone) might have opened the file on another machine and brought it back.

When an "imported" file of any foreign (not Word) type is closed, most recent Word programs will ask if you want to save as a Word document. A careless "Yes" could have copied your file to Word 6 (or some other Word) format. This normally would produce a separate file with a .doc extension and would have left the original .rtf file intact; but your tech may have recovered the Word version for you.

The question is whether it is possible that someone may have saved a .doc version of your file, and your tech recovered it instead of your original WordPad version. If your tech hooked your hard drive up to his own machine for data recovery, he might have opened the file to verify it, and accidentally converted it to Word format.

Post #14 finally suggested that you prefer to use WordPad on your "new" machine. We do not know what other programs you have installed to work with, if any.

I'll repeat: WordPad is a text editor. The default format in which WordPad saves files is as .rtf files, which is a "Rich Text File" using a few "non-printable" ASCII/ANSI characters to define a minimalist amount of formatting for the text.

NotePad is also a text editor, but lacks the ability to respond to the non-printing characters that WordPad can use, so it may - when it can open an rtf file - just show them as "splats" indicating unidentified characters. (Usually unidentifed characters are shown as open rectangles, but loading a different font for Notepad may give some other "default unknown" character.)

A file saved from WordPad on a typical WinXP machine will have a "Word" icon, indicating only that it contains both text and formatting. This may vary if you don't have Word installed. Your preferences (file associations) in WinXP can tell your machine to open an rtf file in WordPad or in Word.

The only default use WinXP makes of WordPad is for opening .txt files that are too large for NotePad. Normal setups often will send .rtf files to Word, if Word is installed, although this may vary with user prefs. With default settings, WordPad does not even appear on the WinXP Start menu, since it's used only for large .txt files.

WinXP does not necessarily use either the icon associated with a file or the file extension (the .rtf) to determine what kind of file it is and what program to use to open it. Usually the file extension is used, but if there's any ambiguity, WinXP can look "inside the file" and decide that it's a different kind.

Since you don't have any version of Word installed on your new machine, the input/output filters described previously will not help. At the same site, however, you should be able to find a "Word Reader" that will allow you to open and read Word documents without having the actual Word program. You cannot edit or save a document with the reader, and I don't recall whether it permits you to print one.

It would be helpful to those trying to give aid to know what file extension appears on the recovered file, so we can at least guess at what format the file may actually have been saved as.

Note that "archaic practice" to which some techies may still adhere was always to change the file extensions of recovered files to avoid overwriting them during "rehab" efforts later. The associated practice was to make a copy of the recovered file and change the extension on the copy back to the original before attempting to open the copy.

Note also that it is entirely possible that the recovered file was corrupted in some way, either during the failure of your computer or in recovery.

As "last resort" I'll dredge up ancient DOS knowledge that almost any file can be cleanly converted to a text file that can be opened in NotePad or WordPad with the simple command in a DOS/COMMAND window:

TYPE filename.xxx > newfilename.txt

For filename.xxx you use the existing file name of your "mystery file."

The > "redirects" the output of the "TYPE" command into the file "newfilename.txt" which will be openable (nearly always) as a text file. For most original file types you will find a whole bunch of "unident" characters, but all printable characters should appear reasonably in order.

The TYPE command simply goes through the file and sends one character at a time to your monitor. By using the "redirect" (>) you send it to a file instead. "Unprintables" are given a default "character" that's the same for all, so they're easily deleted from the resulting file, leaving only printable characters.

I can't guarantee this method will always work, since the Command replacement for DOS is a bit changed: but it always used to work and a trial conversion of a small Word .doc looked usable.

John

Subject: RE: Tech: help me save my dulcimer list?
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 04 Apr 06 - 12:38 PM

Re WordPerfect:

It is a decent enough program.

WordPerfect got it's original market penetration because they produced a "Legal" spellcheck dictionary that omitted the word "trail" which for obvious reasons was a big selling point for all the lawyers. The lawyers who made the decision to use WordPerfect did not ask the wp departments for input, and the original "imposition" was extremely unpopular with wp pros at many firms. Most law firms, at least in a few major "law centers," still use it so far as I know.

Having known a hundred or so wordprocessing professionals who were forced to use WordPerfect when they worked for Law Firms, and who have subsequently spent half the effort they originally devoted to learning WordPerfect to learn how to use Word; I have yet to encounter one willing to return voluntarily to using Word Perfect.

Fluent use of either program requires learning how to use it. WordPerfect users have invested a lot of effort climbing the learning curve, and are perfectly justified in continuing to use it.

Those who start with Word spend half the time learning before becoming reasonably fluent, and those who convert without dragging their heels and screaming protests eventually will find it a more friendly program - in my opinon and based on knowing numerous people who've crossed over and have had professional level experience with both programs.

It's one of many choices you are free to make, and you're each entitled to your own ...... opinions.

(I really did think WordStar was great when it was the only thing I had, and I have used WordPerfect fairly extensively.)

John

Subject: RE: Tech: help me save my dulcimer list?
From: Bert
Date: 04 Apr 06 - 12:47 PM

I hate most modern word processors, 'cos I was spoilt by Magic Window on the old Apple II.

Now I can't seem to get along with a program that behaves differently depending on what you've previosly typed in.

Subject: RE: Tech: help me save my dulcimer list?
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 04 Apr 06 - 01:30 PM

Bert -

Please note a bit of TIC (tongue-in-cheek) in my previous comment. Both Word and WordPerfect are very powerful programs that allow you to do pretty much the same sorts of things differently.

With either program, you absolutely must do a little bit of study on how to "drive the course without hitting the flags."

I had a friend some years ago who ran her business using Lotus 123 (the spreadsheet) for all her business letters; but ...

Find a program that does what you want, and learn how to use it, and either Word or *Word(im)Perfect will get you where you want to go.

* another tic.

John

Subject: RE: Tech: help me save my dulcimer list?
From: NH Dave
Date: 04 Apr 06 - 11:52 PM

My experience in Word Processsing was back in the days of DOS versions of Word and Word Perfect, and a user of either program had to memorize a lot of commands that might not be intuitive, in order to use either programs well. At the time WP put all sorts of codes into your document to tell the printer how to deal with the document.

   About this time Windows came out. Microsoft immediately created a Windows version of Word, while Word Perfect came out with their version 5.1, which had a toolbar and drop down menus, but still kept all of the codes in the document to tell the printer how to deal with the document. In Word fo Windows you could actually see what your page would look like before you printed it out, while WP mostly had printer codes and a couple of commands that would give you some idea what your document would look like.

   From there on out, Word kept being updated and eventually WP was ported over into Windows but by this time it had lost so much ground that it never became a serious contender for most of us.

   You can rename your file in Windows by right clicking on the file's icon and press the "F2" key. The filename will turn blue, and you can type a new name for the file.

   Dave

Subject: RE: Tech: help me save my dulcimer list?
From: Lin in Kansas
Date: 05 Apr 06 - 12:39 AM

NH Dave -

Attention please: JohnInKansas on Lin in Kansas' machine while mine is running some other stuff.

In later versions of Windows, and especially for WinXP, you can select either of two modes of action. In Windows Explorer, where you look for files, the normal mode is to click (left mouse button) on a file to select the file, or to double click to open (execute) the file. If you're set up in this mode, if you click once the file is selected, and if (after a pause so it doesn't look like you're finishing a "double click") you click on a selected file, the filename turns blue and can be changed. Hitting enter, or clicking outside the "edit box" or selecting another file closes the filename edit.

In the second mode, which you can elect to use, the file is selected when you "hover" the mouse pointer over the filename, and a single click opens the file. I don't use this mode.

I believe in either mode you can right click on the filename and select "Rename" from the drop-down menu that opens on right click.

Note that I remember well the days of the thousand magic keys (quick-keys or shortcuts) and avoid them whenever possible, ever since my office buddies learned how easy it is to change someone's shortcut key assignements and decided it was a great practical joke. (In the days before everybody had secure logins, of course.)

John (not Lin) in Kansas