Re: Powerpoint/Word 2008 sound issue

Ron <ronearnest@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I have documents in Word and Powerpoint with little speakers in them.
Clicking the speaker on the document on a Windows computer plays the
recording. But using Word/Powerpoint 2008 on a Macintosh (OS X 1.5.7)
results in an alert:

Word cannot locate the server application for SoundRec objects.

Any suggestions? Solutions?

Ah, welcome to the wonderful world of OLE objects. I've just been
attempting to deal with a similar issue for one of my clents.

Bear with me. Minor ranting is likely.

The short answer is to have a look at this piece of software and see if
you can use it to extract the sounds from your documents.

http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/27721/oleextractor

The long answer...

In my client's case, they have recently started receiving Word documents
(in .doc format) which contain embedded documents in a variety of
formats. If the embedded document is also a Word document, then it can
be opened on a Mac (with Office v.X or Office 2008 - I didn't try 2004).

Any other type of embedded document we tried is a no-go zone, with the
same error message you saw. (The other document types we encountered
were Outlook e-mail messages and PDF.)

What I've learned so far:

OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) is a feature of Windows.

Applications on Windows which support OLE are able to insert documents
inside other documents. This includes documents from completely
different applications. These embedded documents are known as "OLE
Objects", or sometimes "Packages".

If you click on the embedded document, Windows launches the application
which is responsible for handling that document type. The other
application can edit the document, and the embedded document is updated
upon save.

The information about which application to launch is stored in the
Windows Registry. Each application which supports OLE adds information
to the Registry to indicate the types of OLE objects it supports. From
the evidence I've seen, these appear to be descriptive names, not
directly related to filename extensions.

In your case, "SoundRec" is the OLE object type.

On the Mac, Microsoft Office has implemented limited support for OLE.
From my testing, this is sufficient for Mac Office to be able to open
Office documents which are inserted into the same type of Office
document (e.g. Word inside Word).

I haven't tried mixing Office document types (e.g. Excel inside Word). I
don't know if it is possible to create this type of embedded OLE object
on Mac Office, but you can copy and paste an existing one between
documents.

Going outside the Office application suite would require some kind of
centralised registry that other applications could hook into and
register OLE object type names.

Apple already has a similar system for locating applications which can
open documents (based on filename extensions, or Mac file types and
creators), but the OLE support in MS Office for Mac doesn't hook into
this.

I'm unaware if Office for Mac provides any mechanism for other
applications to hook into its OLE support to allow some types of OLE
objects to be opened.

As far as I can tell, Office on the Mac doesn't provide any easy way to
extract an OLE object and save it as an independent file. If that
feature was provided, it would be possible to open some types of
embedded document in another application.

Even with that feature, some embedded document types would still be a
problem. For example, in my case we need to be able to open and display
Outlook mail messages, including extracting attachments. This is only
possible if the Outlook message format is fully supported by another
application. I don't know if Entourage would provide that support, but
Word 2008 doesn't try to launch Entourage when I try to open an Outlook
attachment in a Word document.

I did find some partial solutions.

1. If you save a document in Office 2008 format (.docx), it is possible
to unzip it and dig through the resulting folder to get the embedded
objects. They have some additional header information, but I could see
the actual file buried inside it.

2. Using OpenOffice.org (or NeoOffice) to resave the document in .odt
(OpenDocument) format has a similar effect.

3. There is a free AppleScript application called OLE Extractor which
can grab OLE objects out of OpenDocument files.

http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/27721/oleextractor

You would need to use this in conjunction with OpenOffice.org (or
NeoOffice) to convert your Word documents to .odt files.

I had mixed results. It correctly extracted some types of attachment
(e.g. Word and PDF), but I couldn't do anything useful with the Outlook
messages, and it seemed to be confused by some of them, probably because
they contained attachments.

In your case, this solution should produce some kind of audio file, and
then the question is whether that file can be recognised and played by
any application on the Mac.

The extracted attachment may not have a suitable filename extension, and
it certainly won't have a Mac file type and creator, so Mac OS X won't
give it a sensible icon and won't know how to open it if you double
click it. You will have to try opening it from within various
applications which can play audio files.

Hope this at least gives you a starting point, and I'd welcome any input
on better solutions.

In my client's case, the only software solution I could find which was
certain to work would be to buy Parallels/VMware, plus Windows, plus at
least the Small Business edition of Office 2007 (to get Outlook). Twice
(as two people need to be able to deal with these documents).

The total cost didn't justify it for occasional read-only use, plus the
hassle and overhead of having to run (and maintain) Windows just for
this one specific use, plus the irritation of having paid Microsoft lots
of money to buy several copies of Office 2008 (a while ago) and it
doesn't handle these documents from Office for Windows.

In the process of all this, we found that Microsoft doesn't offer
upgrade pricing if you want to cross-grade from Mac Office to Windows
Office (and I assume the same applies in the other direction).

I tested Crossover with Office 2003 and it had the same problem as Mac
Office - it could only open OLE objects when the embedded document was
the same type as the enclosing one, e.g. Word in Word. This is almost
certainly because Crossover hasn't implemented inter-application OLE
and/or it doesn't have the right information in its emulated registry.

At present, my client will be resorting to paying a secretarial service
to extract data from documents like this, each time they receive one.
Works out much cheaper and avoids all the hassle and support overhead of
Windows.

And people wonder why Mac users don't like Microsoft.
--
David Empson
dempson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
.

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