Activating Difficult Documents

In some cases, eXtyles^® may have difficulty activating documents. Usually, these documents were created with other word processors or they have been manipulated by third-party add-ins to Word. If you encounter problems activating a document, try one or more of these steps:

Save the document as a Rich Text Format (.rtf) file. Quit Word. Reload the .rtf version, save it as a Word document (.doc), and then try to activate it again.

Word (XP and later) can often repair problematic or corrupted files. If you are having difficulty activating a file, try the following steps:

(1) From the Word File menu, select Open.

(2) When you have located the file, click the down arrow on the Open button and select Open and Repair.

(3) If Word has found and repaired errors in the file, it will provide a list of them; close out of the dialog and save the file to make the repairs permanent.

(4) Activate the file with eXtyles.

Select the entire document. Hold the control and shift keys and simultaneously press F9. This will cause all Word fields to be converted to plain text. Since some third-party applications occasionally have corrupt fields (especially some of the third-party reference managers), this step may do the trick.

Select the entire document except the last paragraph mark, copy the selected text, and paste it into a new document. Save and activate the new document.

For files that return the warning "Word has created incorrect RTF with more open ({) braces than closed (}) braces," the problem can often be traced to the page footer. Delete the page number from the footer, delete the baseline file that was generated during the first (incomplete) activation pass, and attempt to activate the document.

Try running a third-party conversion application such as Conversions Plus to convert the document. If the document was not in Word format, try converting it to either Word or RTF format. If the document was in Word format, try converting it to RTF. After each trial conversion, reload the converted document into Word and then try to activate it. Note that you should review the converted document first to determine the overall fidelity of the conversion. In some cases, documents may not convert well, and you may want to try other techniques to get the text out.

Information related to this topic can be found here.

Additional help from Microsoft on troubleshooting damaged Word documents can be found here.