Automating conversion from .doc to docx. format on Mac

macOS
1

I receive many Word documents in the old .doc format, which does not work well in Word for Mac and needs conversion to work in Word for iPad.

Is there a way to automatically convert the format (e.g. with Hazel) when files are downloaded?

Thanks in advance for any suggestion.

2

If you want a Word independent (i.e. not installed and so not scripting that app), I’d recommend making use of the ubiquitous Pandoc. It’s designed for document conversions … though I suspect Word might do a better job on more complex documents.

https://pandoc.org

2 Likes
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Tank you, @sylumer, I will try Pandoc. However, I have Word for Mac installed on my computer through my university’s subscription. If it is scriptable, it would be great. What I would prefer is no to convert every file manually.

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Okay. Maybe take a look at these then.

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Thank you. They can be an starting point to write an script.

I have also fund an app for Mac: Batch Doc Converter However the trial version does not work well on High Sierra.

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You might be able to chain this (from build in automater) with either pandoc or other tools:

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Thank you, @Inuk. It is an useful idea.

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Pedro - did you find a good solution for this?

I have several hundred .doc files that I’d like to convert to .docx so that they play nice with iOS.

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Perhaps this article will give you some ideas. If you’re familiar with Word VBA then the first method is very practical, and it’s what I used a number of years ago. I was using Word for Windows then, but most of the VBA commands work on the Mac version of Word also.

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Joe Kissel’s Take Control of Automating Your Mac has instructions for doing this in Keyboard Maestro. It’s a good example for learning how to use KM, but it’s also just a fancy implementation of the textutil command, which you could use straight from the command line, if you’re comfortable with that.

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Given that this was a rather old thread that was revived, it might be useful to know that there was a related post about using textuil to convert from DOCX to TXT. I’m sure the referenced solution there could be easily converted by simply switching some of the format parameters.

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thanks all.

I’ve got pandoc installed now and can use it to convert a file or two as needed. But i’m hoping to integrate it with hazel to automatically covert some files when they get put in a folder. So it’s time to learn a bit more about Bash scripting.

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You can use a free online service to do the conversion https://freetools.site/document-converters/doc-to-docx