I am still in the trial mode of Devonthink Pro Office–and thus am still at the beginning of the program’s learning curve.
I have been importing and indexing a variety of file types without problem, including Word files. However, I have one large Word file (~155 MB) that I have tried to index or import numerous times, and it fails every time. This seems curious to me. While this may be a large Word file, it’s not that large a file in the scheme of things.
Is there something I’m not doing or something I don’t know either about Word files (of the large variety) or large files period?
Word imports or indexing can fail because of certain kinds of embedded images or other formatting problems in the original file.
You could try removing any images in the document (not a desirable solution, yes). Or print it to PDF and import it. Or open in Pages and Save it back to Word format. Or open it in Word, Select All and Copy, then Paste everything into a new Word document. (Word as you probably know is prone to weird glitches.)
Over here, one or more of these techniques has fixed problems like yours.
Thanks for the reply. It probably is because of some images in the file.
Unfortunately I really cannot play around with formats or with putting into Pages and then back into Word again. This is a client’s document that I am editing, and the format along with the style of editing must be in Word.
This particular instance does not matter so much to me. I simply wanted to index the file in Devonthink so I could access it easily, finding it together with my other editing files.
However, if Devonthink has problems with Word, that may prove to be a problem. The vast majority of my files are Word, and only some of them can be put into pdf. I don’t know if I can pay 150 dollars for an indexing/ cataloguing (etc) program that can’t deal with Word. We’ll see.
FWIW, I think the problem is the Word quicklook generator provided by Microsoft, not DTPO. (DTPO doesn’t present native files; it presents the quicklook view). I have thousands of Word documents (also from clients) in my DTPO databases, and have had an import/index problem with a vanishingly small number.
Thanks for the information. I’m still trying the application out and learning about it. If it is the very occasional file that doesn’t work, then I could work around that. I’ll just have to try importing more files and see how it goes.
–Yeah, I know how quirky Word can be. I personally hate it, but too many other people still use it so I’m stuck with it for the time being.