Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Error in opening MS Office for Mac documents on Windows PC

If you are creating a MS Office document on Mac OSX and need to insert pictures into document, you might get the following error when opening the document on a Windows PC.

"QuickTime™ and a TIFF (LZW) decompressor are needed to see this picture."

A quick fix to this problem is to use the menu option "Insert - Picture - From File". Do NOT copy and paste the picture into MS Word, for example from Preview or Clipboard.

If you copy from the Mac OS X app "Preview", for example, and then paste into MS Office application, i.e. Word, the image will appear in Word, but will NOT be viewable on PC's. Apparently the Mac OSX clipboard, Quicktime, Photoshop, etc, use the TIFF LZW decompressor, which is not available on PCs.