Pictures and Graphs in MS Word trouble

aaike

aaike

bacteria-troubled-brain
I received a Word document from a co-worker (working on Windows) and apparently pictures and graphs don't always show up as they should when I open the document. Some of the pictures show up as a frame with a red cross. Does anyone know what this is/means. If there are workarounds/solutions? I also noticed this with Powerpoint presentations when transferred to another computer... Does it have st. to do with linked and non linked pictures?
 
Bingo - It means the user didn't actually embed the pictures into the document, but only embedded references to them. In other words, when you open it on your machine, Word isn't finding a picture, it's finding a reference to c:\Documents and Settings\Windows User\My Pictures\pic~1.tif or something of that sort.

Now, I'll have to check out a Windows copy of Word to see how the person who sent you the doc may fix it.
 
aaike - oh I feel your pain. Every day I have something like this happen. I count myself an expert in Office, but that comes from years of frustration. Seemless integration and Office are complete oxymorons, but those who built its usability and feature sets are just plain morons. In addition, so many people have trouble pasting in images into ppt that look good (there are about 8 options under paste special, so who can blame them). Don't even get me started on Word tables or Visio! Any way, if your co-worker starts to rant on you for your "incompatible Mac" he/she is way off base and the same would happen if you were on a PC.

symphonix - I don't have my PC up here, but I'm betting aaike's coworker used an option under the Insert menu and had his/her link to file and/or save with file options checked the wrong way to create a "self contained" Word document. He/she should be able to resetablish these links, but in the future, it is just safer to paste special anything (pics, tables, spreadsheets...) into an Office doc rather than use the insert options.
 
Hi all,

I just had this problem with my thesis proposal. I had a bunch of images in my doc, and when I went to print them out in the lab (PCs), The first image could be seen and the rest didn't show up. I copied and pasted these charts from excel, the way I have for years (with windows). I think it's safe to say Office X handles the cut and paste of a graph differently than windows vers of office. Do I need to use paste special to do this? If anyone has any clue, it would be great. It was a chore resurrecting my pictures 20 mins before it was due (and it didn't even look that good!!!) but they still accepted it and that's all that mattered.

MP
 
The strange thing is that e.g. on a page with 2 graphs pasted in exactly the same way, one of them shows up correctly, and the other one doesn't... I also tried to open the document on another PC and everything showed up correctly, so I am not so sure that it really has st. to do with linking. Is there some sort of setting that I could try?

Btw. Another common problem in Word is that greek characters don't show up as they should. I heard that this has st. to do with standard fonts in OS X / Word v. X but is there a way to avoid / overcome this??
 
symphonix, this is (unfortunately) not right. The documents show correct graphs and pics when opened with windoze office.
I found out that formulas tend to be cutten out. Also some filetypes for graphs or pics seem not to be supported. But I didn't do any examinations on this one yet to make a compatibility list.
And this mess was one, if not almost the ONLY, reason for me buying VPC to run my MS Office and open those windoze files.
 
Btw, if you are just trying to open those files or presentations, you can simply tell the windoze user to save as pdfs. Not an elegant solution, but it worked here for some urgent cases. I was even able to run a presentation of powerpoint slides over pdfs. ;)
If you need to change the files, there is AFAIK no other way but using another windoze box or buying VPC.
 
To be honest, I still don't get it...

A document with lots of formulae - so I would expect it's all in the same 'format' right- opens showing 2/3 of the formulae correct and the rest is unfortunately BS...

What's so different with one formula compared to the other? Just out of curiosity I opened an 'affected' document in TextEditor. The formula that showed up correctly in Word v. X does so in TE, but the ones that doesn't show up as "EMBED Equation.3"

Another funny thing... I tried to open a document just to have a look at which things are showing up correctly and wich don't and apparently one of the images that showed up incorrectly the first time showed up nicely right now. Such things get me puzzled...
 
I'm stumped too. Just a guess. Could this be tied to the .doc format not really being 100% compatible between the Mac and Windows versions of Word? What would happen if your PC side saved the file as rtf?
 
I don't know. It would probably help in some cases, but sometimes you simply can't ask to do such things. After all the mac user is the one that is causing trouble... he's not having the same machine as anyone else :-(-:

To cut a long story short, I am afraid this compatibility problem just sucks... If only the guys from MS could do st. about this. Would anyone care to make them aware of this problem (I guess they already do/should but anyway)... ?
 
It's funny but MS often says Office X is the best version of Office they ever made, so you would think they would be interested in fixing this. And yet, I could see them snickering over this sort of thing in private. Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I well remember Word 6 for the PPC when it came out - it took 3 minutes to simply start up on the newest Macs of the day and many thought MS did this on purpose to embarrass Apple and its users. I'm not sure if I bought that idea, but I cannot trust MS. Who can? I mean, the history of MS is to destroy anyone in their way.

What about some of the various file import/conversion software for Mac. I never had the need for that sort of thing, but would it work/help? I can't remember the name of the program I am thinking of, but it is/was quite popular. I'm afraid we need some of our Macosx gurus to help us out on this one.
 
Darn it, I'm so sorry - I didn't bother with their download form and just assumed they had a trial version of MacLinkPlus - they don't! Plenty of other weird little apps, but not this one. Well, there is always the Mac newsgroups for the full version! :) Gees! Maybe you could send them your Word files and ask them to send it back after using their product - if you like what you see, you will buy it!

My school had it at a reduced price, but no longer does. Perhaps there are other similar products WITH a trial?
 
Hi All,

I just came face to face with this problem big time. I was giving a presentation and I found out all my graphs were missing (I used paste special to paste them as images). Here's the weird thing - worked on the 4 macs I tried, but when I tried to use an Office XP machine, they just wouldn't show up. So it's not that they are just putting a reference in. Saving as .pdf only works for a word file... what about powerpoint? Microsoft NEEDS to do something about this.... asap. Has anyone talked to their support?

MP
 
I had similar problems with PPT presentations made on Windows and transfered to another Windows computer.
 
I am still looking for a way to resolve this problem and I am willing to contact MS support, but I am afraid that you don't get e-mail support with an educational licence which I have. Someone else giving it a try?

I also tried to get more information on wether MacLinkPlus would resolve this issue(s) but they don't offer support to (would-be) customers who have questions... So the question remains anyone owning this product? I'd like to send you a file to try!
 
If it makes anyone feel better we recently noticed that some ppt files with animations made in Office 2000 ON A PC, don't play correctly on Office XP ON A PC!!! There aren't simple title/text animations, but animations to demo some UI designs - flying cursors, adding text, changing screens... seems that Office XP adds what looks like a little "hide after click" to some of the animated graphics when that option was definately not selected when the file was created in Office 2000. Nice huh?
 
One workaround (though not a fix) is to include all image files that you've put into your Office documents along with those documents when you move to a Mac or PC from the other (and to instruct others to do so as well). It's not the best solution, but it will both increase the chances of pictures showing up (if it's a linked pic, it's just right there) and allow you to re-embed the pic if it gets broken.
 
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