General problems with changing extensions when using SaveAs in O2007 apps
Hello.
We've noticed a couple of issues with the Office 2007 integration that I hope someone might be able to help with. I have a feeling they might indicate defects, but it'd be good to know if anyone can replicate them, or alternatively if they're just faults in our configuration. So far I can't seem to find much about them in the Worksite Knowledge Base.
The two issues below are, I think, specific examples that appear to relate to the Worksite/Office2007 integration not being very good at Office's tendency to want to save things with different extensions.
(1) - Save As doesn't seem to work properly when moving from an Office 2003 format to an Office 2007 format.
We've noticed that if someone starts opens a Word 2003 document with apptype=WORD (or Excel 2003 with apptype=EXCEL), then chooses Save-As to create a new document, and saves the new document in Word 2007 .docx format, the *entire* profile of the original document gets automatically copied to the new document. This is mostly good except that it includes the apptype field (incorrect with the adjusted format), meaning the Office 2007 document gets an apptype of WORD or EXCEL instead of WORDX and EXCELX.
Consequently when someone checks out that document in the future, Worksite gives it an incorrect extension of .doc or .xls in the checkout folder, even though it should be .docx or .xlsx. On our system, Word 2007 ignores the incorrect extension and opens the document anyway, while Excel 2007 pops up a warning that the format doesn't match the extension.
The place where we really notice this problem, however, is when one of our Office 2003 users comes along. If Office 2003 tries to open an Office 2007 document with an Office 2003 extension, Office 2003 won't detect that it's a 2007 document and so the Office Compatibility Pack won't kick in and convert it. Instead, they get a conversion error dialog which tells them that Word2003/Excel2003 can't understand the format. The other symptom is that the Desksite/Filesite Quickview tab won't display the document, but instead decides that it's a zip file and shows a tree of filenames of all the compressed XML files inside it.
So far the only workaround we have for this is to adjust the application type field of document profiles as we find them, changing them from WORD to WORDX or from EXCEL to EXCELX. (Presumably it'd be a similar operation for Powerpoint, but we have far fewer PPT docs.)
(2) - There's also something weird going on with adding Macros to documents (we've only tried this in Excel 2007). This seems related to the above problem because Office 2007 likes to put different extensions on macro-enabled documents.
Yesterday we had a user with an Excel 2007 spreadsheet which was stored in Worksite (.xlsx). She added a macro to it, and because Excel 2007 strips macros from .xlsx files, she chose Save As to save as a new version, specifically as a .xlsm file. (It seems to be similar behaviour if saving as a new document.)
What happens is follows:
* Excel keeps the original document open (ie. version 1) -- this is different from usual, where Excel would change its title bar to show it as the newly-created document.
* A profile for the new version/document is created in Worksite, but it's created as an EXCELX application. Even if we create a new app-type called EXCELM and use it to map .xlsm files to Excel, the new profile will still be of type EXCELX.
* No document is actually checked into that profile, so Worksite ends up having only a 0-byte file.
* No document appears to even be created in the Worksite client's check-out path, either. As far as I can tell, the macros simply vanish because Excel won't let them be saved in the original document.
The net result of this is that the macros were never saved anywhere, and unfortunately the user lost them. Our workaround which we gave her for now was to ask her to save in Excel 2003 format which would keep the extension consistent as .xls whether macros are included or not.
So there seems to be something quite suspect going on when Save-As is used in conjunction with operations that involve document extensions being changed, which unfortunately is something that happens from time to time with Office 2007 -- particularly when moving from Office 2003 and when macros are involved.
Is this a problem that other people have seen and that's actually known about and is being addressed? Or is it more likely that we just have a broken configuration?
Thanks for any help and feedback with this.
Mike.
