Office 365 Questions

lovemountains wrote:
I had researched online about my problem with Microsoft 365 not "seeing" my flash drive before I posted on RV.net.

My files are not corrupted because I can OPEN and SAVE them on my husband's computer which has Office 2016. I can then SAVE them to ONE DRIVE, and access them on my computer with Office 365.

When I use 365 on my computer, my document is automatically saved to the cloud as I type, but I've never seen an opportunity to give my document a name!

I do our taxes with TURBO TAX and I can OPEN last year's taxes on the flash drive and SAVE this year's tax files on it.

I appreciate you taking time to respond to my problem! I will probably purchase Microsoft 2019 and give up on 365.

I believe if I remember correctly there IS a way to stop Office 365 from automatically saving to the cloud.. I bumped across that somewhere, if you did a internet search using "stopping office 365 from saving to the cloud" I suspect you will find your answer on breaking that bad habit.. Oh, sure 365 will whine about not having "features" and you will no longer have "auto save" but in the end, it is YOUR documents and not MS's..

MS WANTS everything to be "in the cloud" for some reason and you might want to do your homework on Office 2019, it to may have the same issue and you may need to "opt out" of that feature..

You should also be able to buy an additional Office 2016 license and use the existing media to install it instead of buying 2019..

I had researched online about my problem with Microsoft 365 not "seeing" my flash drive before I posted on RV.net.

My files are not corrupted because I can OPEN and SAVE them on my husband's computer which has Office 2016. I can then SAVE them to ONE DRIVE, and access them on my computer with Office 365.

When I use 365 on my computer, my document is automatically saved to the cloud as I type, but I've never seen an opportunity to give my document a name!

I do our taxes with TURBO TAX and I can OPEN last year's taxes on the flash drive and SAVE this year's tax files on it.

I appreciate you taking time to respond to my problem! I will probably purchase Microsoft 2019 and give up on 365.

HappyKayakers wrote:
I'd be interested in hearing what the current file types are that you're having problems with. Are they actually docx? Or something else?

You do have a valid point..

MS office general behavior is to save in the same file format of the original document that was opened..

example is opening a txt file, Word will choose to save in txt even if you use "save as"..

Open DOC file and save or save as should default to DOC..

Open DOCX and Word will default to DOCX for save and save as..

I suspect in OPs case they may be opening a ODT file and Word is defaulting to saving in ODT.. But even if this is the case, they should be able to select to save as a DOC or DOCX format and also be able to select "MY PC" and save to their "library" on their PC..

However, in all Office versions I have used, I know that you CAN also modify that behavior.. You can set the default save to ANY of the file extensions that Office supports..

For instance, when my company moved for Office 2000 to Office 2013, not everyone in the company had Office 2013 since it was a rolling change and could not open new DOCX files.. MS had not come out with the Compatibility pack for Office 2000 that gave the older OFFICE DOCX support at the time. I simply set the default file format to DOC and compatibility problem was solved..

OP may not actually be able to see what the real file extension at the end of the file since MS OS by default is set to HIDE "Extensions for known file types" which to me is a big security risk since you may unknowingly open a malicious file or attachment exe file (since the extensions are hidden you will never know that it is a executable program file).

Extensions for known file types can be easily unhidden safely..

I'd be interested in hearing what the current file types are that you're having problems with. Are they actually docx? Or something else?

lovemountains wrote:
Thanks for all the responses!

When I try to SAVE AS on my new computer with Microsoft 365, I have the following choices: 1. Save a copy online 2. Rename 3. Download as PDF 4. Download as ODT.

Yesterday, I wanted to print one of documents on my flash drive, so I used it on my husband's computer, and had no trouble opening it and printing the document. He has WORD 2016 Teacher and Student, which I had on my old laptop.

Something isn't right..

ODT files are Apache OPEN OFFICE document file format (say that twice fast).. SEE HERE for more details.

While MS Office can save ODT, it is not the "default" format of MS Office.. DOCx is the default of newer MS Office word docs.. The default may have been changed by accident..

You can save to PDF and print it if you like also..

Saving to One drive might be forced now days as MS wants everyone to use it.. I suspect that the default drive location may have gotten changed by accident like the file format.. But you should be able to change that also..

See HERE for detail on save as..

You should be able to select "This PC" instead of One Drive..

I guess I could move my flash drive to my husband's computer and save the documents I want to keep to ONE Drive, then they should be available on my computer. But I wish there was a better solution.

Thanks for all the responses!

When I try to SAVE AS on my new computer with Microsoft 365, I have the following choices: 1. Save a copy online 2. Rename 3. Download as PDF 4. Download as ODT.

Yesterday, I wanted to print one of documents on my flash drive, so I used it on my husband's computer, and had no trouble opening it and printing the document. He has WORD 2016 Teacher and Student, which I had on my old laptop.

If you place those documents back onto your computer, can you open them then? Maybe you have security set up on your flash drive that is preventing MS Office from opening them directly from the flash drive.

If the files are corrupted, and if you can run run Unix or Linux, you may at least be able to see the unformated text in filename by using the Unix or Linux command 'hexdump'.

hexdump -C filename > dumpfilename

In Unix, the above would write a dump of filename to dumpfilename.
In Linux, use the option -Canonical instead of -C.
The option causes any printable characters to be displayed alongside each line of the hexadecimal.

The dumpfilename produced by a Word file will contain a lot of gobbledegook in addition to the raw unformatted text.

Added on edit. Sorry, Linux also uses -C. (I use Unix, and don't know Linux.)

I run Office 365.
I have massive amounts of old documents, some going back into the 90s.
As I go through this stuff to purge it, I open Word, Excel, PP and Pub files with no problems and no errors.

Perhaps, as mentioned, it's something in your settings. I am running all defaults on mine and it has never refused to open files.