I know I have an older MSWord program. I used to be able to open word documents in pages. After switching to Catalina, Word docs can't be opened with either pages or text edit. I really don't want to re-type thousands of work docs. What now?
Show more LessMacBook Pro 15", macOS 10.15
Posted on Nov 13, 2019 12:42 PM
Me too (29) Me too Me too (29) Me too Reply Question marked as Top-ranking reply User level: Level 1Posted on Nov 13, 2019 1:50 PM
I had this same problem (and checked Numbers also based on someone else's comment about issues with both). I contact Apple Support online from this website - they called me immediately. As I explained the problem, April the Technician commented that she had just helped someone else with the same problem. She walked me through this process:
--Force Quit (all application EXCEPT Finder)
--User & Groups - made sure nothing was listed in the Login Items area.
SHUT DOWN (verify black screen of shut down)
POWER . immediately followed by SHIFT - hold SHIFT until Login Menu shows Upper righthand corner of screen had red letters "Safe Boot" . I had to Login 2x.
--make sure Pages and Numbers work properly. (They DID! )
LOGIN . and for me, all was back to normal! Yeah. Thanks April for your prompt, patient, kind, effective help!
Show more LessWord & PDF files not opening under Catalina word and PDF files that I created in 2018 do now not open under Catalina. Neither PDFs nor word doc or docx.
Word docs will not save to Desktop I realize this is a repititious question, but previous answers do not seem to apply. Since having my keyboard replaced by Apple, I do not seem to be able to save my Word documents to my Desktop. Where are they? The instructions in previous answers do not seem to apply. Any help would be appreciated. I have OS Catalina 11.2.3.
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Question marked as Top-ranking reply User level: Level 1I had this same problem (and checked Numbers also based on someone else's comment about issues with both). I contact Apple Support online from this website - they called me immediately. As I explained the problem, April the Technician commented that she had just helped someone else with the same problem. She walked me through this process:
--Force Quit (all application EXCEPT Finder)
--User & Groups - made sure nothing was listed in the Login Items area.
SHUT DOWN (verify black screen of shut down)
POWER . immediately followed by SHIFT - hold SHIFT until Login Menu shows Upper righthand corner of screen had red letters "Safe Boot" . I had to Login 2x.
--make sure Pages and Numbers work properly. (They DID! )
LOGIN . and for me, all was back to normal! Yeah. Thanks April for your prompt, patient, kind, effective help!
Show more Less User level: Level 10 114,761 pointsWhere is the Word document located?
For the Word document that will not open in Pages, click once on that reluctant Word document in the Finder, and press command+i (Get Info). What is shown for the creation date? Word documents older than circa 2001 will be rejected by Pages, TextEdit, and Preview with "document name" can't be opened right now. Pages couldn't read the file. That message was from a Word .doc from 1995 (which I keep to produce this message).
Always share what specific version of Pages you are using via Pages : About Pages. It should be Pages v8.2 on Catalina. Sometimes a reboot of the Mac has been known to resolve this failure to open documents in Catalina, and certainly booting into Safe Boot mode can't hurt either. Be certain to reboot normally from Safe Boot mode.
Another approach would be to install the free LibreOffice Suite, and see if it can open the Word document. As it is an MS Office Suite clone, it will open things that neither Pages nor Word can open. Resaving them is often all that is needed to allow Pages and Word to open the document normally. I always keep a current version of LibreOffice handy for this very rescue purpose.
LibreOffice installs entirely into your /Applications folder. Because it is from outside the Mac App Store, you will need to control-click on the application itself, and choose Open. A brief validation process will occur, followed by another dialog panel. Click Open on it too, and you do not have to repeat this ritual, as LibreOffice will now launch normally.