"The [WordPerfect.wpd] document appears to be corrupt."

[John Gray]

Just wondering if there's anything else I need to do.

Someone has a large batch of WordPerfect documents that need to be converted to standard Word .docx documents.

When opening some of them in Word 2010, I get the message "The document appears to be corrupt. Conversion may be incomplete" and I just get a logo and the first few lines of text of the letter/document.

Are there any additional Word 2010 filters I need to install?

Thanks!

[HansV]

Select File > Options, click Trust Center > Trust Center Settings..., then select File Block Settings.
Make sure that the check boxes for 'Legacy converters for Word' are NOT ticked.

I found a statement that changing the extension of the WP documents to .doc causes Word to open them without problems, but even if it works, that is not an attractive idea for batch conversion.

[John Gray]

Thanks, Hans - it seems that the "Legacy Converters for Word" boxes are already deselected.

I tried seeing if I needed to add Text Converters for WP5 and WP6 in Control Panel -> Programs and Features -> Office 2010 Standard -> Change -> Add or Remove Features -> Office Shared Features -> Converters and Filters -> Text Converters, but as far as I could gather those two converters have already been included.

[HansV]

Could you find a computer with WP installed? If so, you could convert the .wpd to .doc in WP, then convert to .docx in Word.

Otherwise, I'm afraid I don't know what to suggest.

[John Gray]

Thanks, Hans.

We are trying to wean someone off Word Perfect, and a few of his old WP documents might just need referring to at some arbitrary point in the future. He certainly wouldn't want to convert 450 WP documents to Word 'manually'! If we leave WP installed on his new PC, then the temptation to continue using it instead of Word may be irresistible...

Perhaps I will have to try to find a WP macro which will open a WP document and save it as a Word document, for all .wpd files.

[Leif]

Perhaps I will have to try to find a WP macro which will open a WP document and save it as a Word document, for all .wpd files.

Googling for a suitable batch conversion macro does seem to bring up a fair few hits, including:
Batch Conversion Macro

[ChrisGreaves]

Just wondering if there's anything else I need to do....

I had this problem 15 years ago, converting large batches (10,000 documents at a time) from DOS-WP51 to Win-Word97.

Biggest problem WAS the 3rd-party converters with a pop-up message box that waited for me to wake up the next morning to find that only 37 documents had been converted.

I wasn't as smart then as Loungers are today.

Since the errors were un-trappable (that is, they didn't fall into the realm of MSWord's Run-Time-Error system I decided to work out a scheme to trap them.

If you have a Win95 system running Word and Excel and thousands of documents to convert, I can try to locate and then post the files/solution here.

Or if you like I can just sketch out the general method in words.

[John Gray]

Thanks, Leif and Chris

I think I'm going to give up on this for the moment because it's taking up far too much of my time when I have to get several other more important things sorted out before I go off on holiday in a week!

As far as I can tell, the version of WordPerfect which created these documents is 11, whereas the converters in Word 2010 are for WP 5 and WP 6 - so maybe Microsoft gave up on updating the converter for the later versions of Word Perfect? It's not that the documents are complex: usually just a logo at top right, with ordinary text following. Maybe it's the logo which throws the converter? Very annoying!

[Leif]

I have also noticed a fair number of folk stating that all you need to do is rename the .wpd extension to .doc - may be worth a try...

[John Gray]

I did that earlier this morning - unfortunately (and logically!) all it does is bypass the "Open with..." function, and gives the same error message.

[kdock]

I used to have a utility that repaired WordPerfect documents. I don't have time right now to see if I still have it, but you might check WPUniverse or a place like that to see if it's still around. That's IF the documents are actually corrupt and it's not just an issue with Word...

Kim

Added: The program is named WplookA and is an executable rather than a macro. It's also dated January of 1998, but I know I used it to look at WP docs in the mid to late 2000s. K

[John Gray]

Thanks, Kim - I'm pretty certain that it's not that the WP documents are actually corrupt, it's just that Word cannot convert them...

I'll have a quick look at the utility you mention!