What kind of machines does Microsoft actually test its software on? Do they make any effort to replicate real-world situations where people make normal use of all kinds of perfectly valid characters in the names of their files and folders? It really is quite unbelievable that such a bug slipped through.

See, it turns out that, when Microsoft says “ This is not a valid file name,” they mean “This is not a valid file path” and that, in Word 2011, the presence of any non-ASCII character (like an accented letter, the characters, etc.) anywhere in the file path (and not just in the file name) will cause Word to fail to open the file. Upon further investigation, I was able to determine that the problem probably has nothing to with the presence of images in the file, but with something else that I changed at the same time I changed the option to include the images when exporting the PDF file as a Word document in Acrobat Pro: I put it in a different location. After some investigating, I was able to determine that the problem could be avoided by unchecking the option to include images when exporting as a Word file within Acrobat Pro. I was able to open the same document just fine with both Word 2008 and Pages ’09. Yesterday I wrote about a new bug in Word 2011 that causes it to fail to open a perfectly fine Word document with the following error message:

Document inspector word for mac 2011