[SOLVED] Microsoft Office files.

All my Microsoft Office 2003 saved .doc and .xls files on my thumb drive show up as .doc.XML and .xls.XML and will not open in LibreOffice.

I copied them to My Documents which is a networked directory linked to VirtualBox running Windows 2000 guest with Microsoft Office 2003 installed. All the files in that network folder location have inherited the extensions, they all show up as .doc.XML and .xls.XML. Obviously Microsoft Office doesn't want to touch them now either.

If I manually remove the additional .XML suffixes LibreOffice makes an effort to open them, attempts some sort of conversion and fails dismally.

How do I get Zorin 5.2 to not add the suffixed extensions, (changing file names) and allow my files to be read by LibreOffice. If Libre fails to be compatible with one or two of the files then I have the Guest OS as a backup, but this problem is common across almost every file.

My only guess as to what has happened is a possibility that the .doc and .xls files were once .docx and .xlsx files saved as the older formats in either Office 2007 or Office 2010 and artifacts from the newer version contained within the saved files as confusing the OS.

Anyone know what's happening, why and how I can prevent it?

The files have been and are used daily on Windows XP machines with Microsoft Office 2003.

I'm sure that installed Microsoft Office 2003 in the Windows 2000 Guest will work perfectly with those files as it does in XP. The problem is that Zorin OS shows all of the unchanged files on the thumb drive with extensions they don't have, .doc.XML & .xls.XML, (when you remove the drive those files remain unchanged with the .doc and .xls extensions). When I copy them to the Zorin OS the file extensions remain changed because reading the folder through the Windows guest they still show up as .doc.XML etc. If they were truly unchanged, which they should be, the file extensions would remain unchanged viewed from within the windows guest.

I know I could attach the thumb drive to the guest machine or copy the files into the guest and work with them in that, but if I have to do everything in a guest machine I may as well have just installed the Windows OS in the first place.

Zorin OS or possibly a LibreOffice control running as a background process is definitely to blame. It is somehow verifying extensions based on perceived content, which it is getting wrong, then assigning the extension based on that perceived type as opposed to that which has been allocated to the file. There must be a way of disabling this behaviour.

Take a look at what packages are listed with Libreoffice, if you see any you think you may need, mark them for installation.

You can use Synaptic to do this.

Regards Wolfman

Firstly let me than you for the reply.

Are you suggesting that a LibreOffice installation on 5.2, with all software fully updated as of six days ago may have a background control which is unable to identify Microsoft Word and Excel files without additional packages installing.

I'm not trying to be deliberately argumentative here but for an OS whose selling point is it's ease of use for Windows users and an Office suite whose selling point is its compatibility with Microsoft Office files, I find it difficult to believe that to be the case.

So what would cause a system to arbitrarily change file extensions within the OS with no user interaction but only appear to change them on a thumb drive. I'm wondering if it's more likely a setting bug or configuration problem with the file explorer/manager?

G'day,

Just a few comments on this.

I have a number of older documents that were created in Word for Windows 2a, Word 6, Word 2003, Excel 4, and Excel 5. They all show up in my Zorin 5 Libre Office 3.3.4 as .doc and .xls. I also have some Word 2007 files created as .docx and .xlsx that show up in Zorin and Libre Office as just that.

Word 2003 and Office 2003 do work perfectly in Windows 2000 - I used to use a system set up that way.

The various versions of XHTML documents created in Microsoft Word and Excel are different between their versions of MS Office. I've not created any .docx of .xlsx documents in Office 2003 and don't have any, so I can't say what they look like in the current versions of Libre Office.

If you wish to email me a couple of small files that you have showing up in this way, I'm happy to see how they show on my system and respond.

Ernest

edit to change HTML to XHTML

Hi reptor,

why don't you install 2003 on Zorin and remove it from your guest machine?

It is possible to install office 2003 in Zorin? (linux in general)...????

Hi reptor,

why don't you install 2003 on Zorin and remove it from your guest machine?

It is possible to install office 2003 in Zorin? (linux in general)...????

In the past, I've run various MS Office programs on different versions of Linux using WINE without any troubles. So, the short answer is - - YES - - just have WINE installed first. My son has run Windows XP and played major on-line games on Linux systems within a Virtual machine on both Ubuntu and Mepis, as well.

Ernest

G'day Ernest - could you please PM reptor with your email address - I deleted it from your post as you are laying yourself open for spam mail posting your email address in a forum. And thanks for your kind offer of help.

Cheers.

G'day,

Done that. I was aware of that possible problem in the first place, which is why I gave my gmail address, as it goes through three sets of filters before I get it.

FYI - I've a a few IT quals and have worked in the administration of a secure gateway, so I know about IT security issues. But, I also have some personal systems set up so I can conduct business without having to worry too much about them in some situations. My gmail account is one such set up.

Thanks for worrying about me.

Ernest

Update:
Problem with files has been identified, they were all taken from a system where a security policy encrypted them during the copy process. Every single file on the thumb drive from that system received that extension suffix as part of the encryption process.

The Topic however was not in vain, thanks to the advice I am at least aware that Microsoft's Office suite does work well enough on the host. My read ups suggested that there were still some problems hence my decision to use a VM guest. The other reason was that I'd prefer to have the normal user not rely on commercial software; they are less likely to want to open and run a VM to access Microsoft's Suite (even if I did show them that there was such an option).