Re: Structure of Office XP Word Document

From: ITJRW (justice_at_community.nospam)
Date: 03/06/05 

Date: Sat, 5 Mar 2005 18:19:03 -0600

Thanks Cindy, I've just finished e-mailing officeff@microsoft.com to obtain
the BIFF. You were a big help. By the way, I had an painting teacher when
I was 9-11 yrs. old (about 50 years ago) in Houston by the name of Daphne
Meister. Don't know if that name is common but the lady sure could teach
art.

***

"Cindy M -WordMVP-" <C.Meister-C@hispeed.ch> wrote in message
news:VA.0000a84b.0044de6e@speedy...
> Hi ***,
>
> In order to examine the "real" information in the binary file format you'd
> have to request the BIFF from Microsoft. There's a Knowledge Base article
> that
> tells how to go about doing it, although I don't have the number at hand.
>
> Since you have Office XP, an alternate approach might be to compare what
> you
> get when you save the document as a webpage (to round-trip HTML format).
> OTOH,
> this often results in throwing out the damaged part of the document (much
> as
> copying without the last paragraph mark does).
>
> FWIW, it's a known fact that Word documents are very susceptible to
> "hiccups"
> during any kind of transmission process, be it over a network or via
> Email.
> The only safeguard I'm aware of is to ZIP the file (Winzip, for example)
> before transmitting. That, or fix the faulty network connection.
>
>> My office is required to use a UNIX (AIX) Universe (IBM) database
>> application to host and access our data through a telnet connection. Our
>> office uses mailmerge in two different implemenations, and as part of the
>> process, through host processes and VBA macros, Word is opened and a Word
>> files stored on this UNIX server are trasmitted to our Windows 2000
>> client
>> machines. The master document is transmitted and a .dat merge data file
>> is
>> created on the host and also transmitted to the client. This process is
>> failing from time to time and requires numerous retries to complete the
>> trasmission process. Somehow the documents are corrutped during this
>> failure and the only way to "fix" the docuements is for someone who has
>> never merged the document to open the document for editing, copy and save
>> to
>> another document all content up to the last paragraph symbol in the
>> document
>> (the final character showing with All checked to show tabs, spaces,
>> paragraphs, etc.). Pasting this new content into a new document and
>> saving
>> it on the host remedies the problem. However I want to be able to
>> compare
>> the contents of the "header" document information that is found at or
>> after
>> that last paragraph symbol (at least as far as what I can see being
>> transmitted) in both a corrupted document and the newly created document
>> to
>> try to identify how this corruption is taking place during access and
>> transmission.
>>
>> My question is where can I obtain a the contents of the document
>> information
>> stored at or after the last paragraph symbol at the end of every Word
>> document? What would be the best way to examine this in each document?
>>
>
> Cindy Meister
> INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
> http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 8 2004)
> http://www.word.mvps.org
>
> This reply is posted in the Newsgroup; please post any follow question or
> reply in the newsgroup and not by e-mail :-)
>