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I'm having trouble opening some files in Word for Mac 2011.

The files have been though a series of conversions which may be relevant.

They started out as Pages '08 documents.

I then wanted make them more accessible, so I converted them to .doc documents, with no problems or compatibility issues.

I then wanted to make them up-to-date, so I converted them to .docx document, again with no problems.

What I am finding is that when I open some of the documents in Word for Mac 2011, all I see is the gray background. The pages and wordcount at the bottom appear correct, and if I switch to "outline view" or "draft view" the text appears (albeit in a horrible format I don't want to work with). I would like to use "print layout view" for standard, WYSIWYG editing, but I just get the gray background.

Opening the files in Preview works fine, but of course it is read only.

Uploading the files to Google Drive and converting them to gdocs also works, when the files are below the size limits.

Some of the files are quite large, with many images. These larger files seem to be the ones that won't open properly in Word for Mac; smaller ones work (note that some of the smaller files that do open do contain images too).

I'm pretty baffled by this, any help would be greatly appreciated!

I am on a MacBook Pro running OSX 10.7.5

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  • I don't suppose you can easily open them on WinWord and do a "Save As", then see if the new copies open fine on your Mac?
    – Karan
    Feb 5, 2013 at 2:24
  • @Karan I tried this. It didn't help, and in fact I had the exact same problem in Windows - just the gray background for the larger files. FWIW the .docx files all open fine in Pages '08...
    – Tom McIntyre
    Feb 5, 2013 at 20:00
  • If the DOCs have no problems and only some of the DOCX ones do, just keep the former versions.
    – Karan
    Feb 5, 2013 at 20:03

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