What did I do WRONG?

I'm not a tech-smarty, so hrm. Someone more qualified will doubtless come to your rescue. In the meantime, did you paste it in your email or attach it? If you paste it in your email, that'll kill all formatting.

I suggest something easier, actually--or in addition to. Save your wip as a googledoc or attach it there. It always transfers formatting for me from and to googledocs.

cat

Hopefully, you still have your docs in your XP PC. I can't see any reason for them to have been lost.
First question: What version of MS Word are you running in each PC?
Second Q: Did you send the docs as attachments? If not, do so.
When you open your email in the Windows 7 PC, double clicking on the attached docs should open them in MS Word (assuming you have it installed on that PC). Your formatting should be retained.

ETA: I just saw your post above. sounds like your doc was corrupted somewhere along the line. Repeat the process starting with saving the XP doc, attach it to the email as a doc, send it, open the email on the Windows 7 PC and follow the above instructions.

Don't you have a thumb drive to transfer that stuff? Seems emailing would take forever.

Yah, *don't* paste it in the body of the email. It's guaranteed to lose formatting that way.

Pasting it into googledocs will keep the formatting. Attaching it in an email *should* save formatting. But as RJK says, i guess it depends on whether you have the correct word processing program to open it with. If your new computer is trying to open it with wordpad, it may dump all formatting.

cat

Did you write your MS in MSWord? What are you looking at it with now?

If you're using different programs or making a codec jump it can mess you up.

I suggest either a thumb drive or a short ethernet cable. If you go the cable route, make a shared folder on your XP machine and connect the two. Put all of the documents you want into the folder and pull them out with the win7 machine.

If you're still having trouble, try open office. If you just download the writer it won't take too long (unless you're on dial up) Its free, and can open damaged documents to save them, so it's well worth the time even if you prefer word.

And just one question about your manuscript, is your word count the same? That's really what matters. Loosing half your pages with WC intact is nothing. Keeping your page count and loosing your word count is awful.

(I'm very long winded)

My Windows 7 machine came with MS Works which is NOT the same as Word or any other part of MS Office. MS Works sucks dirty duck butt, in my experience, since it has a history of not playing nice (if at all) with any other program.

Remove it ASAP. Delete it. Whatever you have to do to make it go away, do it.

If you still have the CDs for the Word you use on the XP machine, install it. Odds are, it'll work fine. If not, look into a few word processor such as Open Office, which will read your files just fine.

But MS Works sucks Gilbraltar through a bar straw. It doesn't surprise me if it totally mangled your MIP.

Hope that helps.

cathyfreeze said:

Yah, *don't* paste it in the body of the email. It's guaranteed to lose formatting that way.

Pasting it into googledocs will keep the formatting. Attaching it in an email *should* save formatting. But as RJK says, i guess it depends on whether you have the correct word processing program to open it with. If your new computer is trying to open it with wordpad, it may dump all formatting.

cat

Click to expand...

At least "pasting" will save the words, and that's most of the trouble. That's everything to me. Let the publisher/printer/typesetter do formatting.

Converting something to double-spaced TNR 12 is (almost) nothing.

CraftyCreations411 said:

Thanks, I did this as an attachment.

XP uses Word, I can't figure out what 7 uses yet. I'm still trying to get the hang of it.

Click to expand...

7 almost certainly "uses" MS Word, but we don't know if it's on your new system or not. You might be reading this files on your Windows 7 system with WordPad or some cut-down version of Word that doesn't do all the weird and fancy formatting.

CraftyCreations411 said:

What is Hades is a thumb drive? My daughter keeps telling me that I need to move into the 21st century!

Click to expand...

It goes by different names - USB drive, flash drive, memory stick. It's like, several times bigger than a CD (which is actually a CD-R if you're writing to it) as far as how much stuff it can hold. There are little slots on the side, like where you can plug in a printer - these are USB slots, you can plug in these magic memory thingies that will hold ALL your writing. Buy two or three, then copy everything to all of them, so if one or two and/or your computer's hard drive go out, you'll still have a copy of everything.

CraftyCreations411 said:

It took me roughly 2 days to email myself everything. Most of my Word documents came through fine. I wonder if it has something to do with the size of my ms - 10.4MB. All of my spreadsheets came through okay, I just had to rename them.

Can't believe this computer didn't come with Adobe - the other one did.

Click to expand...

Adobe reader, formerly called Acrobat reader? It's easy enough to download from http://adobe.com

Save as RTF. E-mail as attachment. 92% of all potential problems forestalled.

Matera the Mad said:

Save as RTF. E-mail as attachment. 92% of all potential problems forestalled.

Click to expand...

Listen to Matera, save in rtf. Works and word will open the file.

Software doesn't automatically come with a computer when you buy it...it's extra. Different PCs come with different software unless you specifically buy the software with the PC.

Dear tech seeker, use a memory stick, much better that way. And also you should email it in .pdf. The reason why it did that is because the file was to big, emails can only take up to 4 to 5 megabites. Compress the file.

An email can hold way more than 4-5 MB. Most likely the new system does not have Word installed. If it did not specifically come with it, it is not a default program and you will need to buy a new copy, unless you have a license for it from your old system (as in you purchased the program yourself, rather than it being included on the old system).

Emailing everything to yourself as a way of moving the files is a very bad way to do it, though. Besides taking way too much time, it is an easy way for stuff to get lost if it hits a spam filter along the way. There is a very nifty program out there called Laplink PCMover. When I bought my new Dell Laptop a few months ago, it came with it, but you can get it for $40-60 (the latter being the pro verison, which is the one I had). It is well worth the cost. It will help you move all of your files between the two systems, including doing all the appropriate conversions from Windows XP to 7. It doesn't just move files, but also programs which can be quite useful. It worked great for me and I moved from XP Pro to 7. I only had to programs that I had to reinstall or repair after moving due to their own funky systems.

Would also second the recommendation of getting yourself a USB drive, or even better, investing in a good online back up service. I started using BackBlaze recently, which is $50 a year. Its program is extremely easy to use, pretty much just install and forget it. The first "load" of all your files take days, but once its done, it does constantly incremental back ups and keeps several versions back of all files. Very easy to retrieve individual or all files.

The issue isn't the format in which the materials were e-mailed. The issue is that the software in which the manuscript was written on the old system wasn't on the new system. Once the correct software is installed on the new system, all will most likely be well.

As DeleyanLee suggested, download Open Office. It's free, and will open Word files. Gives you time to think about whether you want to spend a lot of money on a word processing program.

Then, get one of these. Thumb drive, flash drive. You just need a little one; mine, I think, was a promotional item--free or $1 at Microcenter--and holds one gigabyte. Plenty for my uses; written text takes very little room. (Just checked; Microcenter has them from $6 to over $200!) You plug it into one computer, put what you want onto it, close it down, unplug it, and bring it over to the other computer. No cord, no battery. Works great.

use RTF

Also, get yourself a dropBox account. Then you can just put the files up on DropBox and then get it on your new computer. Easy.

Thumb/flash drive would work, too.

take it from me--*never* save your wip in just one place. Never save your wip in just 2 places. It's heartbreaking when an entire wip disappears because of some odd glitch, but it's very possible.

3 places minimum. Really.

cat