Problems & experiences with files

Files can be created by different applications. more and more they all try to follow the standards that are defined by the different institutions. On the other hand there is a wild growing forest of apps where they try to use these standards. Take pdf-files as an example. There are the original adobe apps but you find a lot of pdf programs on sourceforge. When you generate pdf files with the different tools you'll find, you'll see that you get different files. This causes problems.... strange problems....

A Time ago i had a corrupt Word file. i'm sure that the file was created with MS Office 2000. But my 2007 did nothing else then put some messageboxes on the screen. after a while i opened the file with My OpenOffice 3.0 and voilà ... problem solved.

In another situation I had an MS Excel 2003 file opened with my Excel 2007.
Ms Excel 2007 was in compatibility-mode. after i changed the file extension to xlsx file i discovered that the filesize reduced with more than 40%.

here are some other standard Tricks wich you can use in these kind of situations :

• Open and Save

1. open file exported from other program
2. Save file in current program

• open the file and copy it to a new File
  

1. open file
2. Select all
3. copy
4. open new file
5. paste all
6. save new file

• Open it in another application / Generate the file with an other application if possible
• Install Different File viewers.
• Some programs have cleaning options.

1. autocad : purge commands
2. office : repair options

• find the autoRecover files from the application

1. asd files for MS Word
2. xar files for Ms Excel