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Arman Danesh

This month I want to deal with a subject which I have been asked about a few times recently - how to make it easy for Word 95 and Word 97 to share document files.

 The problem may not be as uncommon as it sounds. For instance, your office may have upgraded to Office 97 - Microsoft's software suite that includes Word 97 - but you are left with Office 95 at home.

 Microsoft created new features in Word 97, including advanced ways of formatting text, and the ability to embed Web addresses, or hyperlinks, in documents so that you can click on them in Word and immediately jump to the Web page.

 As a result Word 95 has trouble reading Word 97 documents leading to lost formatting information and the appearance of weird garbage characters.

 The situation is made less than elegant by Word 97's standard Word 6.0/95 export filter which, instead of creating a true Word 95 file, generates a rich text format file. While RTF is a robust file type that can handle many layout features, including mixed fonts and sizes, columns and footnotes, it is a less-than-perfect conversion format for Word 95 users.

 To make things worse, there are reports of users of other word processors such as WordPerfect having trouble opening the RTF files created by the Word 6.0/95 filter in Word 97.

 There are several strategies and tools you can use to help remedy the situation:   Install the Word 6.0/95 Binary Converter for Word 97 (http: //officeupdate.microsoft.com/ downloadDetails/wrd6ex32.htm) which allows creation of true Word 95 files with the .DOC extension instead of the .RTF extension.

  This improves compatibility, allowing exported files to be opened by other applications which support Word 95 format, such as FrontPage, WordPerfect and PageMaker.

 The converter is a reasonable size for downloading - just more than 600 kilobytes - and is available from the Microsoft Office Update Web site.

 This site requires a product identification number for a licensed copy of Word 97 in order to download the converter.

 This solution may not be ideal for all users. For instance, if you run Office 97 at work, your corporate information staff may be nervous about your downloading and installing an add-on for Word 97 which they have not tested and are not willing to support - which brings us to the next option.

  Use Windows 98. Its WordPad program can open Word 97 files. This means you can use Word 97 at work and then use Windows 98 and WordPad at home - or the other way around.

 Unfortunately, Windows 95's version of WordPad can open only Word 95 files, not Word 97.

 Of course, if you are faced with the cost of either upgrading from Windows 95 to 98 or upgrading from Office 95 to Office 97, it probably is wiser to upgrade Microsoft Office if you use Word heavily, because of the benefits you will gain in features and functionality.

 But, if you already have Windows 98 on a system which lacks Office 97, you already can open them with WordPad.

 Of course, this has its own shortcomings as WordPad lacks many of the tools from Word 97, such as spell-checking, complex layout controls and support for graphics. Still, for the standard text files which many office users will need to share between home and work PCs, WordPad is up to the task.

 Finally, if you need a system which provides the richer functionality of Microsoft Word but without installing the binary converter for Word 97, you need to consider a third strategy.

  Use RTF as your default document format. This may seem to conflict with the point made earlier that it is better to use the native Word 6.0/95 binary export filter rather than the original RTF filter for Word 95 provided in Word 97. If you need to use native Word 97 files in Word 97, then this is true.

 But, if you do not need all the features of the Word 97 file format then you may want to consider making RTF your default file format.

 Every time you save a file in Word 97 or 95, you simply save it as an RTF file instead of a Microsoft Word file. Then, when you move files between your home and work systems, the file format never changes regardless of whether you are using Word 95 or Word 97.

 Even though RTF cannot provide support for all of the advanced layout features of Microsoft Words native file formats, it supports many advanced layout capabilities and is a well-tested, and well-supported, file format accessible by many applications.



Make sure your PC gets to have the last Word