Is it me?

[carla c.]

I treated myself to a laptop after being laid off. It
has XP installed already. Having used '98 for the last 7
years, I expected only ease & improvements. WHY, then,
can't my .doc files and
excel files be easily read??? My Word docs are without
headers,& being converted to Worderfect(according to
recipients) and my Excel files translate without the
crucial comments & notes!!! HELP!

[Michael Stevens]

carla c. wrote:
> I treated myself to a laptop after being laid off. It
> has XP installed already. Having used '98 for the last 7
> years, I expected only ease & improvements. WHY, then,
> can't my .doc files and
> excel files be easily read??? My Word docs are without
> headers,& being converted to Worderfect(according to
> recipients) and my Excel files translate without the
> crucial comments & notes!!! HELP!

Do you have Office installed? You need to have either Office or the stand
alone applications you are complaining about not having access to.
If you do have office and the applications installed you should have stated
that in your post. Post back with some useful information.
--

Michael Stevens MS-MVP XP

http://michaelstevenstech.com
For a better newsgroup experience. Setup a newsreader.
http://michaelstevenstech.com/outlookexpressnewreader.htm

[Peter A. Stavrakoglou]

"carla c." > wrote in message
...
> I treated myself to a laptop after being laid off. It
> has XP installed already. Having used '98 for the last 7
> years, I expected only ease & improvements. WHY, then,
> can't my .doc files and
> excel files be easily read??? My Word docs are without
> headers,& being converted to Worderfect(according to
> recipients) and my Excel files translate without the
> crucial comments & notes!!! HELP!

Sounds to me like your system came bundled with Corel WordPerfect and
Quattro Pro - it doesn't have MS Word or Excel installed. None of
these programs are part of Windows. They are purchased and installed
separately. WordPerfect and Quattro Pro will read Word and Excel
files and can also save files in Word and Excel file formats. Since
the programs are different, you are finding that certain things are
being lost in the conversion. Since it sounds to me like you require
the "crucial" comments in your Excel spreadsheets and they are not
converting fully in Quattro Pro, you should buy yourself a copy of MS
Office (version 97 or above) and install it.

[LittleMac]

carla c. wrote:
|| I treated myself to a laptop after being laid off. It
|| has XP installed already. Having used '98 for the last 7
|| years, I expected only ease & improvements. WHY, then,
|| can't my .doc files and
|| excel files be easily read??? My Word docs are without
|| headers,& being converted to Worderfect(according to
|| recipients) and my Excel files translate without the
|| crucial comments & notes!!! HELP!

You either need to install MS Office or, if you don't have their
legitimate installation disks, go to www.openoffice.org and download
Open Office. It works good enough with .doc files made in MS Word -- or
those made in WordPerfect, for that matter.

[Mike Brearley]

XP does offer many improvements. However, XP does not offer Word and Excel
as embedded applications. Windows 98 didn't either, they were installed
seperately on your system. If you still have the install disks from the
office applications that were installed on your 98 system, install them on
your XP system. You may want to first remove Word Perfect and the other
program that's opening your excel documents first though. Alternatively,
purchase word and excel or the whole office standard/pro suite and isntall
it on your system. You'll then be good to go...

--
Thanks,
Mike


"carla c." > wrote in message
...
> I treated myself to a laptop after being laid off. It
> has XP installed already. Having used '98 for the last 7
> years, I expected only ease & improvements. WHY, then,
> can't my .doc files and
> excel files be easily read??? My Word docs are without
> headers,& being converted to Worderfect(according to
> recipients) and my Excel files translate without the
> crucial comments & notes!!! HELP!

[Ken Blake]

In , carla c. wrote:

> I treated myself to a laptop after being laid off. It
> has XP installed already. Having used '98 for the last 7
> years, I expected only ease & improvements. WHY, then,
> can't my .doc files and
> excel files be easily read??? My Word docs are without
> headers,& being converted to Worderfect(according to
> recipients) and my Excel files translate without the
> crucial comments & notes!!! HELP!


Your computer presumably came with Corel WordPerfect Office, and
you don't have Word and Excel installed.

Windows XP doesn't comes with Microsoft Word and Excel. Neither
did any older version of Windows. It doesn't come with
WordPerfect Office either. Your Windows 98 computer must have
come with Microsoft Office installed, and your new one has
Wordperfect. Again neither is part of the operating system, and
the only reason you had or have them is because you chose to buy
particular computers in which the vendor offereed them bundled
with these computers.

So don't blame these discrepancies on Windows XP. It has nothing
to do with XP. You shouldn't blame them on WordPerfect either.
What you're seeing is mostly that the files are being read by a
different program from the ones that created them; the result in
doing such a conversion is often less than perfect. You'd likely
see something similar if you had created the files in WordPerfect
and Quattro Pro and tried to read them in Word and Excel.

What to do about it depends on how much money you want to spend
vs. how much effort you want to put into learning new software.
If you want Word and Excel, you should buy a copy of Microsoft
Office. If you can live with the WordPerfect equivalents, you
have a learning curve ahead of you, and perhaps some effort in
converting the files you already have. Personally, by the way, I
Prefer WordPerfect to Word, but Excel to Quattro Pro.


--
Ken Blake
Please reply to the newsgroup

[Peter A. Stavrakoglou]

"Ken Blake" > wrote in message
...
> In , carla c. wrote:
>
<snip>
> What to do about it depends on how much money you want to spend
> vs. how much effort you want to put into learning new software.
> If you want Word and Excel, you should buy a copy of Microsoft
> Office. If you can live with the WordPerfect equivalents, you
> have a learning curve ahead of you, and perhaps some effort in
> converting the files you already have. Personally, by the way, I
> Prefer WordPerfect to Word, but Excel to Quattro Pro.
>
>
> --
> Ken Blake
> Please reply to the newsgroup
>
>

This is a bit off topic but not by much. I am with you regarding your
preference of WordPerfect over Word and Excel over Quattro Pro. I use
WordPerfect at home where I have the choice of what I want to use but
in my office we use MS Office. Myself and the people who work for me
make heavy use of Excel. We import a lot of data files into Excel in
order to analyze different aspects of the data. We have some binary
data files which we import, parse, and convert to ASCII using macros.
The only problem we face now, and this is where Quattro Pro comes in
handy, is that quite often the number of records in the files exceed
the number of rows in Excel (65,536). Quattro Pro has a limit of one
million rows. We can split the files and then import into Excel but
when there are over 500,000 records it makes it more difficult to
analyze the data in the ways we want to. Do you or anyone else have
any idea as to how many rows Excel 2003 will support? Excel has a far
better import utility than Quattro Pro and, other than Quattro Pro's
handling of one million rows, there is no reason to use it otherwise.
I do have a few huge spreadsheets that I use Quattro Pro for but Excel
is program "of record" in the office. I haven't been able to verify
the number of rows in the next version but if it is anywhere near the
amount that Quattro Pro has I can justify an upgrade for my
department.

[Silly You]

"carla c." > wrote in message =
...
> I treated myself to a laptop after being laid off. It=20
> has XP installed already. Having used '98 for the last 7=20
> years, I expected only ease & improvements. WHY, then,=20
> can't my .doc files and=20
> excel files be easily read??? My Word docs are without=20
> headers,& being converted to Worderfect(according to=20
> recipients) and my Excel files translate without the=20
> crucial comments & notes!!! HELP!

Your first clue would be "Having used '98 for the last 7=20
years" !=20

Bwahahahahahahaha!

[Crusty \(-: Old B@stard :-\)]

Don't you realize that you created these files with Microsoft Word and
Excel? Why would you think that you can work on them without having the same
programs installed on the new computer?

"carla c." > wrote in message
...
> I treated myself to a laptop after being laid off. It
> has XP installed already. Having used '98 for the last 7
> years, I expected only ease & improvements. WHY, then,
> can't my .doc files and
> excel files be easily read??? My Word docs are without
> headers,& being converted to Worderfect(according to
> recipients) and my Excel files translate without the
> crucial comments & notes!!! HELP!

[CWatters]

Hey Crusty go easy,

You would be surprised at the number of people who don't realise that the
copy of Office pre-installed on their old PC wasn't part of the OS and won't
be automatically included on the new PC they've just ordered. Why do you
think there are so many adverts for cheap PC that include Works in the small
print?

Colin



"Crusty (-: Old B@stard :-)" > wrote in
message ...
> Don't you realize that you created these files with Microsoft Word and
> Excel? Why would you think that you can work on them without having the
same
> programs installed on the new computer?
>
> "carla c." > wrote in message
> ...
> > I treated myself to a laptop after being laid off. It
> > has XP installed already. Having used '98 for the last 7
> > years, I expected only ease & improvements. WHY, then,
> > can't my .doc files and
> > excel files be easily read??? My Word docs are without
> > headers,& being converted to Worderfect(according to
> > recipients) and my Excel files translate without the
> > crucial comments & notes!!! HELP!
>
>