Dealing with MS Word

Text blank

We had an issue with Word on Mac version 15.32 where opening a document presents you with a blank page, but the text is present, but ‘hidden’.

Selecting the text and changing the font, or the font colour or the hidden attribute did not correct it.

But, switching to outline view and then back to print view forced the rendering of the text…

AutoSave and Recovery

From http://smallbusiness.chron.com/open-autosaved-asd-files-47094.html we learn that there are a few ways to see that Word has auto-saved a document for you - a ‘recovery pane’ is displayed when you open Word if it detects a file. Or you can go to you recent files link and select a ‘Recover files’ link.

Auto-save files can be littered across the filesystem as .asd files. Double-clicking on them does not load Word and trigger the recovery process, you have to associate them with Word first.

See https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/107686/how-word-creates-and-recovers-the-autorecover-files and MS’ advice on recovering at https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/316951/how-to-recover-a-lost-word-document

This post on superuser is also helpful.

Word and links

So Word 2011 can’t handle links to pdfs

• https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_word-mso_mac/hyperlinks-are-very-slow-to-open-word-is-preparing/e3223cb7-2da2-40de-b754-fc8d58ae035e
• https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2733631?start=0&tstart=0

And Word 2013 amd 2015 converts the ‘#’ character in a URL, which is perfectly valid syntax, to ‘%20-%20’ - breaking a document that we have written that links to many urls with anchors.

• http://superuser.com/questions/596414/ms-word-2013-hyperlinks-with-anchor-tags-aka-hash-tags-bookmark-tags-to-ext
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/25070176/hyperlink-changes-from-to-20-20-when-clicked-in-excel
• https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_word-mso_windows8/word-2013-hyperlink-converting-to-20-20/4e8a2e8d-b889-4c77-8276-551b11e296d4
• Solution? Set default browser to IE (and possibly back to Chrome or Firefox) http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17656083/excel-hyperlink-to-web-page-location-with-id-or-named-anchor

Export to PDF breaks hyperlinks

Using both the ‘Save As…’ and OSX’s print to PDF functionality hyperlinks are lost in the output.

A possible solution, but not available on my edition. http://superuser.com/questions/396143/how-to-export-from-word-to-pdf-without-losing-urls