Hi, I have an indexed folder with some thousends of very old microsoft word for windowsdocuments. Those generated with Word 97 cannot be searched with DTP3 and cannot be previewed within DTP3. Is there any possibility to convert all of them in a format automatically (either within DPT3 or with another software) so that I can search and preview them with DTP3? Doing it manually by importing them into word and saving it in a new format is not possible due to the huge amount of documents.
Are you able to open them with TextEdit or preview them in the Finder via QuickLook? What’s the extension of these documents?
The format / extension is doc. I can open them with textedit on my mac. I can open them with Word on Windows. I can NOT open them with Word on my mac (there I get the error message: " Fehler: [Dateiname] weist einen Dateityp auf, dessen Öffnen in dieser Version blockiert ist https://support.office.com/de-de/article/fehler-dateiname-weist-einen-dateityp-auf-dessen-öffnen-in-dieser-version-blockiert-ist-8afc36c0-67bc-43a9-a2f4-3f0b332fef24?ui=de-DE&rs=de-CH&ad=CH". I can not open them with macos preview in the finder.
As I can open them with textedit, shouldn’t DTP3 have a possibility to search in this files and preview them?
Maybe pandoc can help to convert in „batch mode“. Most of my document convert needs are covered by pandoc, even old file formats.
Good luck
I have read that devontechnologies releases also a wordservice app. might this be used in such a case. if yes, how?
as far as I have understood, pandoc can only handle newer docx files
No, WordService would not help here.
And Criss was asking if you can QuickLook the files in the Finder.
no, preview / quicklook in the finder does not work, however it’s possible to open the file with tetxedit.
maybe antiwordservice? http://www.apfelwiki.de/Main/AntiWordService
I would give LibreOffice a try. Search for “LibreOffice batch convert” and you will get a number of hits. Some of them seem to be for-pay but when it comes to thousands of files to convert the money for a batch converter might be very well spent.
I never used anything like this, but to my experience LibreOffice, while not pleasing to the eye, has always been good in converting files, including older formats.
I would remove that indexed folder from DEVONthink (and hopefully you indexed it as a parent folder) as you need other processing to be done to it before it’s in any way functional.
PS: Why did you index a whole folder of these files instead of testing a handful first?
By default Word documents use a Quick Look-based preview. As this doesn’t even work in the Finder, you could try to switch to the alternate view (see View > Document Display or navigation bar).
wow — @cgrunenberg you are great!!! indeed, in the alternate view I can see the text content of such (very old) doc files…
In case that these documents aren’t searchable please send a copy of such a document to cgrunenberg - at - devon-technologies.com and I’ll check this - thanks.