topic Re: Opening Word 2007 file in EG4.3 question in SAS Enterprise Guide

Opening Word 2007 file in EG4.3 question

JarvisJ — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 20:26:43 GMT

I'm trying to Open a Microsoft Word 2007 document in Enterprise Guide 4.3 and have been having issues doing so. It looks like EG is converting it into text (based on the icon in the process flow) and then opening the document as if it was a spreadsheet. I am using File/Open/Other and then clicking on my Word document to open. The document is just text, but can be formatted with bullets and numbering for project instructions. I have not had this issue when opening documents from Word 97-2003.

I have attached a few sample screencaps before from when running this. The file I am trying to open below consists of the sentence: "Test document to load into SAS".

Opening Word 2007 file in EG4.3 question

nrose — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 03:15:25 GMT

I dont think SAS EG is capable of opening up .docx documents.

Can anyone clarify whether this capability will be present in future EG versions?

Nick

Re: Opening Word 2007 file in EG4.3 question

Cynthia_sas — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 22:21:48 GMT

Hi:

A .docx file is a Microsoft proprietary format XML file in an archive format that was designed especially for Microsoft Word. It is a representation of a word processing document, not necessarily a DATA file. You can actually see "down inside" the docx file if you create a .DOCX file using Microsoft Office, as I show in the screen shot with Jabberwocky.docx and then make a copy of the file, but change the file extension and name to be something like: Jabberwocky - Copy.zip. Then, open the ZIP-named file with WinZIP or some other program. Once you look "inside" the .docx file, you will see that it is not just a single file, it is a collection of files, in an archive format, and as such, it is completely unlike other types of Microsoft Word file formats from earlier versions of Microsoft Office.

So it does not surprise me that Enterprise Guide would not "import" your .docx word processing document into a SAS dataset. I did not know that EG would open and import a Word document, such as with an Word 97-2003 format word processing document. However, if you opened a track with Tech Support, it is possible that they may be able to help you figure out a way to get your information into EG. A few ideas come to mind.

1) If you are sure that you were able to import Office 97-2003 Word documents in the past, then save your .docx file to that other file format and retry the import

2) Try to save the document as a CSV or tab-delimited file and then try your import again.

3) Cut and paste the data from the Word document into Excel and either try to import from Excel format (after saving) or explicitly save the file as CSV in order to do the import.

The attached screen shots show what a manually created .DOCX file looks like when viewed with WinZIP.

cynthia

Re: Opening Word 2007 file in EG4.3 question

nrose — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 23:05:04 GMT

Hi,

I dont think the issue is importing a docx file, but being able to include it in the project as a word file. This is often useful if you have documentation or other material in word format that you want to include in your project. Whilst .pdf and .doc files can be included without issues, SAS EG tries to import .docx files as a data file, which, is not what we want it to do.

Nick

Opening Word 2007 file in EG4.3 question

Cynthia_sas — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 04:50:57 GMT

Hi:

That is an interesting turn of events. If you re-save the .DOCX file as a Word 97-2003 regular old .DOC file, I wonder whether EG will complain.

cynthia

Opening Word 2007 file in EG4.3 question

JarvisJ — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 12:15:05 GMT

Saving the documents in the 97-2003 format will allow me to upload the documents into EG. It's just when I try to upload them in the .docx format that I have an issue.

For the time being, I've known that I can upload them in the 97-2003 format, I was concerned as future versions of Word are released whether this would still be a worth while option.

Jeff

Opening Word 2007 file in EG4.3 question

Haris — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 15:58:58 GMT

Still wondering if SAS has issued a patch to EG that would allow linking external *.docx files. With the newest Hot Fix C44014 it continues to try and read *docx as data files and opens and import wizard when a link is pasted.

I also noted that simply changing the extension from *.docx to *.doc stops the import behavior. MS Word issues a couple of flags when opening a file with manually changed extension but it kinda works.

Being able to link text--MS Word *.docx in particular--files to my EG projects has been a very important feature in my workflow.