Opening And Saving Word Documents In OS X Leopard Text Edit - OS X Odyssey 916
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This is not as much of a problem as it used to be for us non Word users. Many, (in fact most) word processors can open and save Word files these days with formatting reasonably intact. However, if you're using Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, you don't need any other Word-savvy software other than Leopard's bundled Text Edit program which these days warrants categorization as a full-fledged word processor.
Text Edit can both open .doc files with basic formatting such as fonts, text formatting (bold, italic, etc.) colors, line- spacing, alignment and justification, etc., sustained reasonably accurately. However, more advanced formatting such as borders, style sheets, graphics, footnotes, bulleted lists, and such don't survive the conversion intact or at all. However, tables seem to translate, although not necessarily appearing exactly the same as they would in Word.
When you save a Text Edit document as a Word file, some of that sort of advanced formatting stuff actually will make the transition in the other direction, notably buttons, numbering, and tables, but not style sheets. Consequently, as with the famous cartoon depicting a dog sitting at a computer, captioned: "on the Internet, no one knows you're a dog," with Leopard Text Edit no one has to know you don't have Microsoft Word, which might help with your cred. in certain circles.
Charles W. Moore
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Posting Comments Requires Membership
I think the key to your article is “reasonably accurately”. It all depends on what you consider to be reasonable and that is quite a subjective term. When I have tried using text edit the needed copying and pasting cost me a lot of time. It seems to me that if you really need compatibility the best bet is the $149.00 student edition of office. It will save you a lot of time. But I will concede that in a pinch text edit will allow you to access the information.
Mark Dempsey
I wish there was some way of just getting the text out without all the formatting but get it so it works on every document. Most people designs are so horrid that I really would rather just get the text. If it was a fool proof way to do so on every web page, I would set up my browser to do the same. It is hard for me to understand how people could choose such visually assaulting combinations. And these are generally the ones “proudly hand coded” without any interactivity, so it shouldn’t be that hard to find some combination of colors and basic design that doesn’t hurt the eyes.
Hi Mark;
The subjectivity is why I used the “reasonably” qualifier.
I’ve found that Text Edit’s support of Word formatting is good enough for my purposes, but I appreciate that it may fall well short for some users.
Charles
Hi Ben;
Like you seem to be, I’m a devotee of plain text with minimal formatting.
I usually just open anything I want to archive in Tex Edit Plus or TextWrangler and delete the extraneous junk.
Incidentally, iCab has a nice Text Only option in its Save As dialog.
Charles
