Please Help! Images disappearing: Pages to Word

[Anomoley]

Hi guys!

First off, this is an awesome place you've got going here; all of the answers I've been finding in these forums ever since getting my new MacBook Pro have been absolutely invaluable to me. Thanks for being here!

Now, onto my question:

I work as an editor and constantly find myself having to edit documents sent to me in Word format. These documents often come with embedded images, and these images are sometimes visible, and other times they aren't.

I've been working around this issue: if I see that there were images initially included in the doc, I email the writer and ask him to forward them to me as separate attachment--so that's been okay.

Here's a bigger problem:

Once I complete the editing process in Pages and embed these images ("inline," not "floating"), then email the article back to the writer in Word doc. format, the images that I've embedded do not appear in the emailed document!

Upon opening the document on their PCs, they get all the text just fine and are able to open it, but where the images are meant to be, it just says this:

"SHAPE \* MERGEFORMAT"


Do any of you have any ideas as to what I'm doing wrong? Am I not formatting something correctly?

I don't know what to do, and this is urgent as it's my job!

Thanks a million to anyone with any ideas or answers!

 

[MisterMe]

...

I work as an editor and constantly find myself having to edit documents sent to me in Word format. These documents often come with embedded images, and these images are sometimes visible, and other times they aren't.

...

Do any of you have any ideas as to what I'm doing wrong? Am I not formatting something correctly?

...

Wow! Just wow! What you are doing is so unprofessional. If you are editing Word documents for clients, then you should be using Word to do it. The fact that Word is such a crappy application is all the more reason to do so. In my own experience, the most compatible version of the Microsoft application is Word 2004. Word 2008 is decent if you don't have VBA macros.

Back to the point. Converting from Word may introduce gotchas. Converting to Word may introduce additional gotchas. The problem with the latter is that you are sending your gotchas to your clients.

The bottomline: You are on a fool's errand. There is no way to guarantee that files that you convert from Pages format will not generate error messages when your clients open them on their Windows machines. Other members of this forum might recommend that you maintain a Windows installation with Word installed for testing your conversions. I am not willing to go that far, but sending untested converted files to your clients is a shot in the dark. If they are paying money to you, then they deserve better.

 

[ora]

I agree with MisterMe, I am also among other things an editor and much as I love apple, Pages is simply not an option. I use Office for Mac 2008, along with a virtual machine running Windows with Office 2003 and 2007 for editing. Editing in a different OS/programme to the original is just too dangerous.

Also, where possible you should edit pre-layout - and in plain text. Given the choice I edit in TextEdit!

 

[ChrgGrl]

While you guys did honestly point out that he should be using Word, the actual advice you gave isn't going to solve his problems either.

I got the same problem with "SHAPE \* MERGEFORMAT", starting from a Word 07 document and then pasting to a Word 07 document.

So, here is what I learned:
In order to not have this happen, when I pasted the object, I had to use the 'Paste Special' and select Picture (Enhanced Metafile) in order for this not to have that error.


Here are my more detailed steps:

1. The original document had been created directly in Word as a collection of shapes (my case I was creating Word Flows and Work Breakdown Structures).
2. The items were grouped to make moving and sizing them a little easier.
3. I copied and pasted to the new document.
4. Eventually saved and closed document.
5. Re-opened document.
6. I added a caption to the 'figure'. Since this was a Project Plan, it needed captioning. (Not sure if 5 or 6 was the place where it picked up the error.)
7. I did get my object and caption, I also got an error message on the object (SHAPE \* MERGEFORMAT).