Any document browser available?

[Ronald]

How to browse through Word and Excel documents folder?
When there is a document folder, is there any application to view documents
like in a slideshow, changing to next document with mouse click?
Mainly Office 2002 and 2003 Excel and Word.

I did some googling but couldn't find anything functional.
There certainly might be some image browser like application, capable to
show preview images and etc.

Thanks for any ideas.
Roland

 

[Bob I]

The trial version of Office 2007 is the latest "viewer".

 

[Ronald]

Hi

I installed Office 2007 in Trial mode but couldn't find any searched
function.

Which Office 2007 part offers 1. a stepping through documents in one folder
(like a slideshow) or 2. a folder documents album thumbnail preview mode?

Could you please be more precise?

Thanks!

 

[JoAnn Paules]

It sounds like you're trying to find something along the lines of a album
with small versions of a file without having to open the file. I've never
seen anything like that. I would suggest naming your files something that
would indicate what info that file contains.

 

[Ronald]

Hi,

I have seen few years ago a photo album software which had a built in
document preview, so that along with image thumbnails were documents in
thumbnail view. About this soft I can't recall anything more details or
capabilities.

But situation when someone gets a thousands of documents with not
descriptive names shouldn't be so rare.
Renaming of such a bunch of documents is waste of time as most of these are
most likely not needed later.

So the single solution is a Document browser (closing previous and opening
next with a mouse click).

It may be related to image album application or document preview capable
photo album application, which might be also of a great help.

I can't believe that something like that doesn't exist. In fact it really
feels, that it should be a component of Office any suite.

 

[Gordon]

How to browse through Word and Excel documents folder?
When there is a document folder, is there any application to view
documents like in a slideshow, changing to next document with mouse click?
Mainly Office 2002 and 2003 Excel and Word.

I did some googling but couldn't find anything functional.
There certainly might be some image browser like application, capable to
show preview images and etc.

Thanks for any ideas.
Roland

Don't know what you googled, but there seems to be plenty here:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=Document+preview+software&meta=&aq=f&oq=

 

[Ronald]

Hi Gordon,

Following the link you provided opened google with most sites colored as
visited (by me)
If you follow any link there, is there what I'm looking for? No.

Most lead to the shareware lists which seem to be rather irelevant to the
topic.
Something I found indeeed and installed with great expectations, but these
failed to open most documents or where else not usable.

I have spent 5-6 hours searching and experimentig without ANY real results.

BT
Roland

 

[Bob I]

Open Word, clicl Office Button, click Open, Set the View to "Preview"
(icon in upper right of Open dialog) select file to preview.

 

[Ronald]

Hi Bob

The same is available in Office 2003 and not sufficent for browsing 700
documents named just by numbers.
I have downloaded several appliocations which claim to offer required
functionality but no luck, these are capable to0 open only 50% of docs or so
sloooow, that I have stopped evaluating.

 

[Bob I]

Seems that insufficient thought was given to naming the documents. What
is it you actually want to find by "browsing" a document?

 

[Ronald]

Hi Bob,

I have got the bunch of word documents, which names don't have names but
machinery generated numbers instead.
I have googled and tried following applications - File center, Turbo
Browser, FilePreview and some others each of has required more or less time
just to find out that these aren't up to the task.

So finally I have returned where I started, that is the Word's own File Open
Preview, which you also suggested .....
But results aren't much better - Word 2003 preview is capable to preview
only some 20-30 files and then there starts to appear occasionally a text
"Preview not available", after what I have to close Office and reopen, in
order the preview to function again. On other PC where I installed Office
2007 open/preview doesn't work as expected at all, because Office 2007 keeps
Previewed files open and I can't sort with drag and drop files to
appropriate folders.

Still I have an imagination, how work would flow, when there is an bug free
photo album and slide show like document browser ....

 

[Bob I]

Since they are documents perhaps doing search for text and then you may
drag and drop the found files into the proper folders that way?

 

[Ronald]

Thanks for your friendly suggestions, but I'm more a technician and my
purpose is to sort out corrupted documents.

To my suprise - I have found myself in a stone age!
The single working solution appears to be double click each documents, wait
until it's opened or until Word reports it can't be opened and then switch
back to file explorer and drag the file to the according folder. I have
spent almost 2 days searching for a suitable solution, while during these 2
days I probably already had finished the work manually!

 

[Bob I]

In that case select a block of them to open at once. Then you may wait
for the error message to appear at the ones that don't open.

 

[Steve Rindsberg]

Thanks for your friendly suggestions, but I'm more a technician and my
purpose is to sort out corrupted documents.

It would've been useful if you'd mentioned that in the first place.
It shouldn't be too difficult to write a macro that attempts to open each DOC
in a folder, traps any errors that result and reports the names of files that
provoke errors.

Would something like that be sufficient?

 

[Ronald]

Thanks, such macro would be a great thing and I just didn't dare to ask such
a big thing
Writing good macros isn't such easy and I was sure it's an easy cake to find
a good document browser (which I could keep for the rest of life ) and
when not found I just blamed my bad luck while googling.

Trying to open word doc and if there is any error moving to whatever next
folder macro would be great!
Some files require installation of obscure office component, which even when
installed is required again each time and I believe these are just corrupt
and other files weirdly reported that network site not available when trying
to preview with word open, while file were all in the same folder with
normal names, but obviously a just kind of MS Word bug. As I just afterwards
learnt that MS Word Preview may have failed with correct files, I need now
to start the whole work over again, as likely I had deleted also proper
files from my work directory..

 

[Steve Rindsberg]

Thanks, such macro would be a great thing and I just didn't dare to ask such
a big thing
Writing good macros isn't such easy

No, and I don't claim to be a good Word VBA coder, not by any stretch of the
imagination. But this seems like it might work:

Option Explicit

Sub RunMe()
Dim sInput As String

sInput = InputBox("Enter full path to folder where files are stored" _
& vbcrlf _
& "include trailing / character", _
"Folder", "")
If Len(sInput) > 0 Then
Call TestFiles(sInput)
End If

End Sub

Sub TestFiles(sDirectory As String)
Dim sMsg As String
Dim sFileName As String
Dim oDoc As Document

sFileName = Dir$(sDirectory & "*.doc")
While Len(sFileName) > 0
On Error Resume Next

' Try to open the file
Set oDoc = Documents.Open( _
FileName:=sDirectory & sFileName, Format:=wdOpenFormatDocument)
If Err.Number = 0 Then
' opened it ok
oDoc.Close
Else
sMsg = sMsg & sDirectory & sFileName & vbCrLf
Debug.Print sDirectory & sFileName
If Not oDoc Is Nothing Then oDoc.Close
End If
Err.Clear
On Error GoTo 0

' get another file
sFileName = Dir$()

Wend

End Sub




and I was sure it's an easy cake to find

 

[Ronald]

Hi Steve,

Great work. I'm trying to deserve this honor with implementing macro.
As my VBA experiences never reached any acceptable level, there are soem
questions.

I found the single text to enter this macro an input file name, as below,
but macro stops with pop up dialog "include trailing / character", _"
Is there something else missing I have to enter?
How the macro is expected to handle results - correct files and failed
files, are these movied to other folder or just a list is created?

Thank you!

That's the part I added my folder name:

Sub RunMe()
Dim sInput As String

sInput = InputBox("E:\recup_doc_test/" _
& vbCrLf _
& "include trailing / character", _
"Folder", "")
If Len(sInput) > 0 Then
Call TestFiles(sInput)
End If

End Sub

 

[Steve Rindsberg]

Hi Steve,

Great work. I'm trying to deserve this honor with implementing macro.
As my VBA experiences never reached any acceptable level, there are soem
questions.

I found the single text to enter this macro an input file name, as below,
but macro stops with pop up dialog "include trailing / character", _"
Is there something else missing I have to enter?

Yes ... very simple though. Change this:

sInput = InputBox("E:\recup_doc_test/" _
& vbCrLf _
& "include trailing / character", _
"Folder", "")

to this:

sInput = "E:\recup_doc_test\"

(pardon the mistake in the "trailing / character" ... that should've been a /
character)

How the macro is expected to handle results - correct files and failed
files, are these movied to other folder or just a list is created?

It just creates a list. You can press Ctrl+G to see the debug output (and
copy it to another file if you like) or at the end of the TestFiles routine,
add Msgbox sMsg to see them on screen.

We could probably modify it to move the files to a known folder if you like,
or maybe rename them to BAD_originalName or the like.

 

[Ronald]

Hi

Thanks for your time, macro almost works, except now it stops on occasional
files with Word error:
"Word failed reading from thsi file (2334458.doc). Please restore the
network connection or replace the floppy disk and retry."
And there are many such files with this error.
The error is already familar to me from my earlier trials. I wonder what
might be the origin of such weird error, as all files are on same local disk
folder.