Selecting text encoding when opening and saving files. Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel and PowerPoint file formats Converter to display word file correctly
FOR THOSE WHO HAVE OLD MICROSOFT OFFICE INSTALLED SUCH AS 97, 2003, 2007 and 2010
FOR COMPATIBILITY OF OFFICE FORMATS, PLEASE INSTALL THE APPROPRIATE SOFTWARE.
so that new formats open in old versions
Review
For users Word programs, Excel or PowerPoint packages Microsoft Office XP and 2003: Before downloading the Compatibility Pack install high priority updates from the website Microsoft Update before you download the compatibility pack.By installing the Compatibility Pack as an add-on to Microsoft packages Office 2000, Office XP, or Office 2003, you can open, edit, and save files in the new file formats used in the latest versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. You can also use the Compatibility Pack with Microsoft Office Word 2003, Excel 2003, and PowerPoint 2003 viewers to view files saved in new formats. For more information about the Compatibility Pack, see the Knowledge Base article.
Note. If Microsoft program Word 2000 or Microsoft Word 2002 is used to read or write documents containing a set of complex characters, then to display correctly Word documents For newer versions of the application, please refer to the information contained in this article.
Administrators: You can download the administrative template for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint converters included in the Compatibility Pack.
Update. The Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack has been updated to include Service Pack 2 (SP2). Now if DOCX files or DOCM contain custom XML tags, the tags are removed when the file is opened in Word 2003. For more information, see KB978951
System Requirements
- Operating systems: Windows 2000 Service Pack 4, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, Windows Vista Service Pack 1, Windows XP Service Pack 1, Windows XP Service Pack 2, Windows XP Service Pack 3
- Windows 7;Windows Server 2008
- Recommended Microsoft Office programs:
- Microsoft Word 2000 SP3 Microsoft Excel 2000 SP3 and Microsoft PowerPoint 2000 SP3
- Microsoft Word 2002 SP3, Microsoft Excel 2002 SP3, and Microsoft PowerPoint 2002 SP3
- Microsoft Office Word 2003 SP1 or later, Microsoft Office Excel 2003 SP1 or later, and Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003 SP1 or later
- Microsoft Office Word 2003 Viewer.
- Microsoft Office Excel 2003 Viewer
- Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003 Viewer
Instructions
Installing the update
- Make sure your system is up to date by installing high priority updates and required updates downloaded from the Microsoft Update website (required for Microsoft Office XP and 2003 users).
- After installing High Priority Updates and Required Updates from the Microsoft Update website, download the Compatibility Pack by clicking the button above and saving the file to your hard drive.
- To run the installer, double-click the saved file on your hard drive. executable file FileFormatConverters.exe.
- Complete the installation by following the onscreen instructions.
Deleting a download file
When you open a text file in Microsoft Word or another program (for example, on a computer, the language operating system which is different from the one in which the text in the file is written), the encoding helps the program determine in what form the text needs to be displayed on the screen so that it can be read.
In this article
Understanding text encoding
The text that appears as text on the screen is actually stored as numeric values in a text file. The computer translates numeric values into visible symbols. An encoding standard is used for this.
An encoding is a numbering scheme according to which each text symbol in the set corresponds to a certain numeric value. The encoding may contain letters, numbers and other symbols. Different languages often use different character sets, so many of the existing encodings are designed to represent the character sets of their respective languages.
Different encodings for different alphabets
The encoding information saved with the text file is used by the computer to display text on the screen. For example, in the "Cyrillic (Windows)" encoding, the character "Y" corresponds to the numeric value 201. When you open a file containing this character on a computer that uses the "Cyrillic (Windows)" encoding, the computer reads the number 201 and displays "Y" sign.
However, if the same file is opened on a computer that uses a different encoding by default, the character corresponding to the number 201 in this encoding will be displayed on the screen. For example, if the computer uses the "Western European (Windows)" encoding, the "Y" character from the source text file based on the Cyrillic alphabet will be displayed as “É”, since this is the character that corresponds to the number 201 in this encoding.
Unicode: a single encoding for different alphabets
To avoid problems with encoding and decoding text files, you can save them in Unicode. This encoding includes most characters from all languages that are commonly used on modern computers.
Since Word is based on Unicode, all files in it are automatically saved in this encoding. Unicode files can be opened on any computer with an operating system English regardless of the language of the text. In addition, on such a computer you can save files in Unicode that contain characters that are not in Western European alphabets (for example, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic or Japanese).
Selecting encoding when opening a file
If in open file the text is distorted or appears as question marks or squares; Word may have incorrectly determined the encoding. You can specify the encoding to be used for displaying (decoding) text.
Open the tab File.
Click the button Options.
Click the button Additionally.
Go to section General and check the box Confirm file format conversion when opening.
Note: When this check box is selected, Word displays a dialog box File Conversion Whenever you open a file in a format other than Word (that is, a file that does not have a DOC, DOT, DOCX, DOCM, DOTX, or DOTM extension). If you work with these types of files frequently but don't usually need to select an encoding, be sure to disable this option to prevent this dialog box from appearing.
Close and then reopen the file.
In the dialog box File Conversion select item Coded text.
In the dialog box File Conversion set the switch Other and select the desired encoding from the list.
In the area Sample
If almost all of the text looks the same (for example, squares or dots), your computer may not have the correct font installed. In this case, you can install additional fonts.
To install additional fonts, do the following:
In Control Panel, select the item Uninstalling programs.
Change.
Click the button Start and select Control Panel.
Do one of the following:
On Windows 7
On Windows Vista
In the control panel, select the section Uninstalling a program.
In the list of programs, click Microsoft Office, or Microsoft Word if it was installed separately from Microsoft Office, and then click Change.
On Windows XP
In Control Panel, click Installing and removing programs.
On the list Installed programs Click Microsoft Office, or Microsoft Word if it was installed separately from Microsoft Office, and click Change.
In a group Change Microsoft installations Office click the button Add or remove components and then click the button Continue.
In the section Installation options expand the element Office Common Tools, and then - Multi-language support.
Select the font you want, click the arrow next to it and select Run from my computer.
Advice: When opening a text file in one encoding or another, Word uses the fonts defined in the dialog box Web Document Options. (To bring up the dialog box Web Document Options, press Microsoft Office button, then click Word Options and select a category Additionally. In the section General click the button Web Document Options.) Using the options on the tab Fonts dialog box Web Document Options You can customize the font for each encoding.
Selecting encoding when saving a file
If you do not select an encoding when saving the file, Unicode will be used. In general, Unicode is recommended because it supports most characters in most languages.
If you plan to open the document in a program that does not support Unicode, you can select the desired encoding. For example, on an English operating system, you can create a document in Traditional Chinese using Unicode. However, if such a document will be opened in a program that supports Chinese but does not support Unicode, the file can be saved in the "Chinese Traditional (Big5)" encoding. As a result, the text will display correctly when you open the document in a program that supports Traditional Chinese.
Note: Because Unicode is the most comprehensive standard, some characters may not appear when you save text in other encodings. For example, suppose that a Unicode document contains text in both Hebrew and Cyrillic. If you save the file in the "Cyrillic (Windows)" encoding, the Hebrew text will not be displayed, and if you save it in the "Hebrew (Windows)" encoding, the Cyrillic text will not be displayed.
If you select an encoding standard that doesn't support some characters in the file, Word will mark them in red. You can preview the text in the selected encoding before saving the file.
When you save a file as encoded text, the text for which the Symbol font is selected, as well as the field codes, are removed from the file.
Encoding selection
To use standard encoding, select the option Windows (default).
To use MS-DOS encoding, select the option MS-DOS.
To set a different encoding, select the radio button Other and select the desired item from the list. In the area Sample you can preview the text and check whether it displays correctly in the selected encoding.
Note: To increase the document display area, you can resize the dialog box File Conversion.
Open the tab File.
In the field File name enter a name for the new file.
In the field File type select Plain text.
If a dialog box appears Microsoft Office Word - Compatibility Check, press the button Continue.
In the dialog box File Conversion select the appropriate encoding.
If the message "Text in red cannot be saved correctly in the selected encoding" appears, you can select a different encoding or check the box Allow character substitution.
If character substitution is enabled, characters that cannot be displayed will be replaced with the nearest equivalent characters in the selected encoding. For example, an ellipsis is replaced by three dots, and corner quotes are replaced by straight ones.
If the selected encoding does not have equivalent characters for the characters highlighted in red, they will be stored as out-of-context (for example, as question marks).
If the document will be opened in a program that does not wrap text from one line to another, you can enable hard line breaks in the document. To do this, check the box Insert line breaks and specify the break symbol you want (carriage return (CR), line feed (LF), or both) in the End lines.
Finding encodings available in Word
Word recognizes multiple encodings and supports encodings that are included with the system software.
Below is a list of scripts and their associated encodings (code pages).
Writing system | Encodings | Font used |
|---|---|---|
|
Multilingual |
Unicode (UCS-2 little endian, UTF-8, UTF-7) |
Standard font for the "Normal" style of the localized version of Word |
|
Arabic |
Windows 1256, ASMO 708 |
|
|
Chinese (Simplified) |
GB2312, GBK, EUC-CN, ISO-2022-CN, HZ |
|
|
Chinese (traditional script) |
BIG5, EUC-TW, ISO-2022-TW |
|
|
Cyrillic |
Windows 1251, KOI8-R, KOI8-RU, ISO8859-5, DOS 866 |
|
|
English, Western European and others based on the Latin alphabet |
Windows 1250, 1252-1254, 1257, ISO8859-x |
|
|
Greek |
||
|
Japanese |
Shift-JIS, ISO-2022-JP (JIS), EUC-JP |
|
|
Korean |
Wansung, Johab, ISO-2022-KR, EUC-KR |
|
|
Vietnamese |
||
|
Indian: Tamil |
||
|
Indian: Nepali |
ISCII 57002 (Devanagari) |
|
|
Indian: Konkani |
ISCII 57002 (Devanagari) |
|
|
Indian: Hindi |
ISCII 57002 (Devanagari) |
|
|
Indian: Assamese |
||
|
Indian: Bengali |
||
|
Indian: Gujarati |
||
|
Indian: Kannada |
||
|
Indian: Malayalam |
||
|
Indian: Oriya |
||
|
Indian: Marathi |
ISCII 57002 (Devanagari) |
|
|
Indian: Punjabi |
||
|
Indian: Sanskrit |
ISCII 57002 (Devanagari) |
|
|
Indian: Telugu |
To use Indian languages, you need to support them in the operating system and have the appropriate OpenType fonts.
Only limited support is available for Nepali, Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Malayalam and Oriya.
Review
Microsoft Office XP and 2003 Word, Excel, or PowerPoint users: Install high priority updates from the Microsoft Update website before downloading the Compatibility Pack.
By installing the Compatibility Pack as an add-on to Microsoft Office 2000, Office XP, or Office 2003, you can open, edit, and save files in the new file formats used in latest versions Word, Excel and PowerPoint programs. You can also use the Compatibility Pack with Microsoft Office Word 2003, Excel 2003, and PowerPoint 2003 viewers to view files saved in new formats. For more information about the Compatibility Pack, see Knowledge Base article 924074.
Note. If you use Microsoft Word 2000 or Microsoft Word 2002 to read or write documents that contain complex characters, you should refer to article 925451 to ensure that Word documents display correctly in newer versions of the application.
Administrators: You can download the administrative template for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint converters included in the Compatibility Pack.
Update. The Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack has been updated to include Service Pack 2 (SP2). Now, if DOCX or DOCM files contain custom XML tags, the tags are removed when the file is opened in Word 2003. For more information, see KB978951
System Requirements
Operating systems:
Windows 2000 Service Pack 4, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, Windows Vista Service Pack 1, Windows XP Service Pack 1, Windows XP Service Pack 2, Windows XP Service Pack 3
Windows 7;Windows Server 2008
Microsoft Word 2000 SP3, Microsoft Excel 2000 SP3, and Microsoft PowerPoint 2000 SP3
Microsoft Word 2002 SP3, Microsoft Excel 2002 SP3, and Microsoft PowerPoint 2002 SP3
Microsoft Office Word 2003 SP1 or later, Microsoft Office Excel 2003 SP1 or later, and Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003 SP1 or later
Microsoft Office Word 2003 Viewer.
Microsoft Office Excel 2003 Viewer
Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003 Viewer
Instructions
Installing the update
Make sure your system is up to date by installing high priority updates and mandatory updates downloaded from the Microsoft Update website (required for Microsoft Office XP and 2003 users).
After installing High Priority Updates and Required Updates from the Microsoft Update website, download the Compatibility Pack by clicking the Download button above and saving the file to your hard drive.
To run the installer, double-click the FileFormatConverters.exe executable file saved on your hard drive.
Complete the installation by following the onscreen instructions.
Deleting a download file
In the operating menu "Start" Windows systems Click the Control Panel icon.
Select Add or Remove Programs.
On the list installed programs Select Compatibility Pack for the 2007 Office system, and then click Remove or Add or Remove. When a dialog box appears, follow the instructions to uninstall the program.
Click Yes or OK to confirm deleting the program.
For the full text of the Microsoft Office 2010 Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel and PowerPoint file formats, see the downloadable file.
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