.docx files display in draft preview, .doc and .xls don't...

[Paraselene]

Hey there. I'm currently trialling xplorer² pro, and am pretty much convinced that I'm going to buy it. The killer feature for me is the easy method of altering the NTFS "comments" section - but I'm still ironing out a few quirks. This is the main one that's holding me back.

As I say, .docx files display properly in draft preview, .doc and .xls don't, they display hex, e.g. -

D0 CF 11 E0  ....  00000
A1 B1 1A E1  ....  00004
00 00 00 00  ....  00008

Oddly enough, when I go to "normal" preview instead, I'm prompted to open the .doc and .xls files in word/excel respectively, but .docx files get no prompt - in fact, I just get a blank in the preview pane.

I've searched for other solutions and I can't find anywhere to download the MS office Ifilters, besides being bundled with the latest WDS. I've downloaded that, and it hasn't helped. I've changed the encoding to unicode, and that doesn't help either. Nothing's turning up in the forum posts (that I can see), and I didn't find a solution in the quickstart or help manual. I presume the option to "save preview" in .doc files as a workaround isn't necessary, anymore - and anyhow, I don't fancy bloating my files.

I'm running XP, Office 2007, and my spec should be up to scratch. I've also run xplorer² lite on a laptop with XP/Office2003, and it won't display .doc OR .docx files properly.

Paraselene.

[fgagnon]

Hi Paraselene,

Welcome to the board.

I suspect this is a settings issue with with Office 2007.

On my regular machine both preview types work fine with Office documents.   [XP-Pro sp2 with x2 v1.7.0.5 and Office 2002]  So .docx documents are non-existent.

On my wife's machine both preview types work fine with legacy Office 2002 documents.   [XP-MediaCtrEd sp2 with x2 v1.7.0.5 and Office 2007]  However  .docx documents preview their text in QV pane on 'Draft' tab, but show only a blank field in 'Normal' tab. (Somewhat the opposite of what you reported.)  :crazy:

At the moment, I don't have time to examine the settings differences to t-shoot the situation.  Maybe another user has a handy solution.

[nikos]

this is certainly an issue with office 2007. Can you search for text in DOC files and what does the draft preview pane show in case of positive hits?

[james_k]

DOCX files seem to consist of a structure of PK-zipped .XML files,
don't think searching for text makes sense there.

[nikos]

that's the beauty of IFilter, it allows extracting text no matter how the document is stored -- that's the theory anyway

[Paraselene]

Can you search for text in DOC files and what does the draft preview pane show in case of positive hits?

Sorry about the delay... I can indeed search for text in .doc files, and the draft preview pane shows the .doc file as if I'd opened it in notepad (i.e. text is visible, but there's plenty of garbage characters in there too). Odd behaviour... I'm pretty sure I haven't altered any settings on the preview pane.

Paraselene.

[Robert2]

Here is from http://blogs.msdn.com/ifilter/:

"Wednesday, December 19, 2007 1:08 AM
MS Filter Pack released !
I'm pleased to announce that after months of blood, sweat and toil, the MS Filter Pack is finally available !!! The package can be downloaded from :

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/deta ... laylang=en

Contents:
The filter pack includes the following IFilters:

·         Metro (.docx, .docm, .pptx, .pptm, .xlsx, .xlsm, .xlsb)

·         Zip (.zip)

·         OneNote (.one)

·         Visio (.vdx, .vsd, .vss, .vst, .vdx, .vsx, .vtx)

Supported Products:
·         SPS2003, MOSS2007, Search Server 2008, Search Server 2008 Express

·         WSSv3

·         Exchange 2005

·         SQL 2005, SQL 2008

·         Windows Desktop Search 3.01, WDS 4

Overview:
·         The Filter Pack installs the above IFilters on the machine

·         Each IFilter is registered with Windows Indexing Service

·         Each product above has a corresponding KB to describe how to register the filters"

You might also want to have a look at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/944433/en-us ("The 2007 Office documents are not found when you try to search for the documents in the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 site collection. ...  This problem occurs because a 2007 Office IFilter is not installed.")

Hope this helps.

Happy New Year to All!

[Paraselene]

MS Filter Pack released... The package can be downloaded from:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/deta ... laylang=en

Downloaded and installed this, with no success (I actually see all 2007 files with the quick previewer perfectly well, so that's no surprise). I can't find the Office 2003/MS Works Ifilters anywhere... this is immensely frustrating (I've discovered I have the same problem with .wps and .wks files).

If anyone finds these Ifilters, a link would be much appreciated. Alternatively, if Nikos could bundle the required Ifilters with installation instructions, that'd probably be a viable workaround.

Paraselene.

[nikos]

i can't bundle these files since they aren't redistributable (i'd need permissions and who knows what more). But in your case it could be another problem, who knows?

i did some digging up in my system (office 2003) and the filter is this dll
C:\WINNT\system32\offfilt.dll

if you don't have this, then try to find the DLL following this registry trace:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.doc\PersistentHandler
@={98de59a0-d175-11cd-a7bd-00006b827d94}

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{98de59a0-d175-11cd-a7bd-00006b827d94}\PersistentAddinsRegistered\{89BCB740-6119-101A-BCB7-00DD010655AF}
@={f07f3920-7b8c-11cf-9be8-00aa004b9986}

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{f07f3920-7b8c-11cf-9be8-00aa004b9986}\InprocServer32
OffFilt.dll

[Paraselene]

After a lot of tinkering, I've resolved the problem.

If anyone else experiences similar problems, this is the approach I took (in a roundabout way):

Download Citeknet's Ifilter Explorer from http://tinyurl.com/337mqx
Review Desktop Search IFilters resource at http://tinyurl.com/4pg4z
Find the name of the offending .dll (in this case, I couldn't see MS Office documents, so it was offfilt.dll).
Check to see if the .dll shows up in Ifilter Explorer. In my case, it didn't.
Search your root/windows directory for the offending .dll. Mine was in windows.0/system32/dllcache.
Transfer it to the system32 folder, and register it. I think this can be done via right click context menus, but in the case that that's only possible via an addon I'm using, you can do it by hitting win+R and typing:
regsvr32 "<path>\NameOfFile.extension"
i.e. for me it would have been "regsvr32 d:/windows.0/system32/offilt.dll"

It should show up in Ifilter Explorer now, and xplorer² should be able to quickview the corresponding files.
If your search of the windows directories doesn't turn up the appropriate .dll, you can either google for it, or download the latest Windows Desktop Search. You may find, as I did, that it installs the .dll in the wrong place, in which case the last 2 steps are applicable.

I hope this turns out to be helpful for someone.

Paraselene.

[nikos]

nice! this Citeknet's Ifilter Explorer is useful but it's the only thing people should use from that website! All the filters are buggy and crash xplorer2

i hope you can still see previews of .docx and other new files

[Paraselene]

nice! this Citeknet's Ifilter Explorer is useful but it's the only thing people should use from that website! All the filters are buggy and crash xplorer2

Perhaps some mention of this should go on the splash screen when xplorer² boots? The link to "miscellaneous text filters" (the site I mention above, http://tinyurl.com/4pg4z) advocates those Citeknet Ifilters. New users could be forgiven for thinking that they were fine to use.

i hope you can still see previews of .docx and other new files

I can, yes. For further reference, btw:

If you install Office 2007, you'll probably need to make use of this workaround to see Office 2003 files. I found this out when I reinstalled it and had to work the trick a second time.

You can use Robert2's link (http://tinyurl.com/2hxlto) to view Office 2007 files in the draft preview, without having to install the whole suite. Again, you'll need to go through the above process with the offfilt.dll file to make both 2007 and 2003 files viewable- the installer unregisters that .dll.

Paraselene.

[nikos]

the whole office thing has gone mental! 2007 will screw up the world+dog since these new docx can't be read by anybody else (think collaboration with other people in the enterprise  :shock: ) and i read that the 2003 SP3 adds insult to injury and does away with some backward compatibility
http://www.drbill.cc/2008/01/03/microso ... patibility

m$ will do anything for a buck! (clearly they're trying to get everybody on 2007)

[Demetris]

the whole office thing has gone mental!

There is an interesting situation developing lately around the new office file formats of MS and their standardization:

http://www.noooxml.org/

Maybe this is not a completely unbiased source of information, but I'm sure smart x2 users can filter out any biased parts.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Personally, over the last few years I've been using TXT UTF-8 for everyhting that I can. Sure, there are many types of content that cannot be accomodated in this way, but I it is the best and easiest protection I can think of against this chaos of office formats (and I'm not talking about MS formats only).