Copy Office files from a Mac to a PC

Question

A friend of me recently dumped his Mac fpr a PC. He used Microsoft Office for Mac and has several hundred Files (Word, Excel) which were copied over to the new PC using a USB disk.

Microsoft Office is now unable to read any of there files. I suspect this is because of little endian vs. big endian. Is there any tool which can converted all theses files automatically, doing this by hand would take ages.

Answer 1

I am quite certain this is no endian-ness issue as I never had any kind of problems like that with thousands of files opened constantly on both platforms by dozens of users in the last 10 years. Office itself took care of that while it was still an issue on the PPC platform.

You should try to read the files on a Mac to test if they are still readable there.

Beside that, this question should better be posted on superuser.com

Answer 2

Unless his Mac and version of Office predate OS X then, no, it's not big/small/medium endian, it's not Office.

Office 2004 and above documents are 99% compatible with Office 2003/7 - there may some slight formatting issues, but you would certainly be able to open them. Even pre Office 2004 I don't ever recall there being a problem.

I suspect the problem is with the particular copy of the files on the USB drive - is it perhaps formatted HFS?

Answer 3

If he's a looong time Mac user, he may never have gotten into the habit of adding .doc or .docx, .xls or .xlsx, etc. to the end of his filenames. Can you verify that his files have appropriate filename extensions on them?