As some of you may know, I've been spending a lot of time lately coming to terms with my new purchase, namely an Apple MacBook Air.
I've come a long way in a very short period of time. I must admit, having been a PC user for many years, it took me a while to get my head around this whole Mac thing. Anyhow, it's been six weeks now and I'm starting to feel comfortable with my MacBook Air.
One of the first things I did after I took possession of my Mac was to go out and purchase Microsoft Office for Mac 2011. Installing the software was easy. However, I soon discovered that I couldn't open any of the Microsoft Word files that live in my Dropbox. I could open them from my PC but they wouldn't open on my Mac. I went to my local Next Byte shop where the scruffy but helpful Geek behind the counter was stumped by my problem. He tried a few different things but in the end all he could come up with was to reinstall Office.
I really didn't want to have to go to all that trouble so I did some research using my trusty friend Google and came across a post in the Dropbox Forums titled Can't open Word Files in which a number of Dropbox users discussed the fact that they were unable to open Word files on their MacBooks.
Whilst the discussion in the Dropbox Forums was certainly interesting it didn't really help me. In the end, I did some testing of my own and came up with my own solution. It occurred to me that Microsoft Word for Mac 2011 may have taken exception to the unusual naming convention I usually use when naming my files and folders. In the past I have tended to make my folder names as descriptive as possible. In doing so I have sometimes use keyboard characters on my PC that I shouldn't. (That's a hint!). Here's an example:
02 - Graccon; 2011; Admin; Invoicing In
I had created this folder on my PC sometime ago then copied it to my Dropbox. My PC didn't seem to mind the fact that I had used a semicolon in the naming of my folder. And my Dropbox didn't seem to have a problem with it either. It only became a problem after I purchased a MacBook Air, installed Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 and started opening Word documents on my Mac rather than my PC.
Slowly but surely I’m going through my Dropbox and renaming each and every folder so that if any of those folders ever contain a Word file I'll have no problem opening them on my PC and/or my Mac. It’s going to take me a while but its something that needs to be done. The folder above now looks like this:
02 - Graccon # 2011 # Admin # Invoicing In
Strangely, whilst Microsoft Word for Mac 2011 doesn’t seem to like folder names that contain a semicolon it has no such problem with file names containing a hash.
