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Textpad could become an ideal vehicle to see the text content of doc files with what seems like very little effort.

Why do this?

Microsoft Word not only takes a long time to load, but each time you
open an email attachment you run the risk of unleashing a virus.

Wordpad does not support macros, so it can be used to look at doc files
safely. However...., Wordpad is unique to each release of Windows.

- The W98SE Wordpad cannot open Word2000 doc files.
- The W2K Wordpad can handle Word2000 doc files, but my system has
graphics filter problems and the option to continue by ignoring
graphics causes a frozen pane which needs CtlAltDel to remove.

When Textpad opens a doc file the screen shows chunks of binary code scattered between groups of text content.

Seems easy to do:

- Do not show binary content in on-screen display

Undoubtedly hard to do and a nicety:

- Interpret tables to an ASCII format rather than stringing the
entries in a single line of text

endlcom wrote: Microsoft Word not only takes a long time to load, but each time you
open an email attachment you run the risk of unleashing a virus.

Just configure your Word.
Set Security options for running macros (you can choose between "Off", "ask me each time", "only when signed", ...)

endlcom wrote: When Textpad opens a doc file the screen shows chunks of binary code scattered between groups of text content.

That's normal - word documents are NOT textfiles.

endlcom wrote: Do not show binary content in on-screen display

How should it decide what is binary content?

I often use Textpad for files containing control characters ...

endlcom wrote: - Interpret tables to an ASCII format rather than stringing the
entries in a single line of text

If all this were implemented in Textpad, it would load as slowly as Word.

Try Word Viewer instead.[/url]

The current and future releases of Word should be much easier to interpret with TextPad where they use XML (WordML) as the document format.

You hope. Microsoft are getting better so I trust them on this one.

You can use the "strings.exe" utility from the NT Resource kit to yank out the text data and then load it into textpad if you really want to do it that way