Can't copy word document to Open Office

[Bernadette]

I've always been able to do this before, but suddenly I'm not able to. It's a free one-month trial of Office, if that makes any difference. Lynne, help me out here! 

[Gardener]

Try saving in OO as a .doc or .docx; .odt could have conflicting formatting issues.

You’ve not stated the problem behavior, just that there’s a problem. What are you trying to do, how, and what is the result (behavior and associated errors)? 

[Bernadette]

When I try to copy a very long document from Word into Open Office, the document stops at 11 pages, instead of copying all 900 or however many the document happens to be. I've tried saving the document as .doc and as .txt, and the same thing happens.

[Gardener]

Apologies. I misunderstood and had the problem reversed.

Are you manually highlighting the txt or doing a Ctrl+A?

Do you have this problem with non-Word docs of a similar length?

[Bernadette]

Ctrl+A. I've never had this problem before, even with Divine Intimacy, and that was 1100 pages. 

[Gardener]

Can you email it to me? I’ll see if I have the same problem on home lab.

[Daniel]

Is it a low-end computer, and do you have a lot of other programs open? Because I'd think that 900+ pages of text would require a lot of RAM, especially if the text is formatted. So maybe your computer has reached its limit? Try freeing up some RAM by closing the other programs (and ideally rebooting the computer), and try again.

Though, I'd think that if it reached its RAM limit then it simply wouldn't copy anything at all (rather than copying 11 pages). And it would probably display some sort of error message. So maybe that's not the problem after all. Plus, this wouldn't explain why the same thing is happening when exporting to *.doc and *.txt, since exporting would be only require disk space, not RAM.

Maybe the word processor is using the wrong encoding and/or maybe there are some corrupt bytes about 11 pages into the document, such that the computer takes these bytes as string-terminators or something, causing it to think that the document is only 11 pages long rather than 900+... both when you try to copy it and when you try to export it, but not when opening it initially. (No idea whether this is possible or not... just a guess...)

[Bernadette]

I was finally able to do it, by copying the document into Notepad and from there into Open Office. 

[Lynne]

I was finally able to do it, by copying the document into Notepad and from there into Open Office. 

Great! Sorry that I was late to the party! What version of Office is it, Office 365?

[Bernadette]

Yes, it's Office 365. I wish I could just buy Word separately, on a disc. 

[Daniel]

Yes, it's Office 365. I wish I could just buy Word separately, on a disc. 

Why not just use Open Office? Do you like Word better or something? (I haven't used Word in years...)

[Bernadette]

Word lets me remove paragraph breaks. Which is really handy when every line has a paragraph break.

[Gardener]

Word lets me remove paragraph breaks. Which is really handy when every line has a paragraph break.

Try this: https://smallbusiness.chron.com/replace-line-breaks-openoffice-44956.html

[Lynne]

Word lets me remove paragraph breaks. Which is really handy when every line has a paragraph break.

Try this: https://smallbusiness.chron.com/replace-line-breaks-openoffice-44956.html

Gardener to the rescue!