Problems opening text files on Mac and Windows

Computers and software are far more intelligent these days than they ever were in the past, but sometimes they can still be very frustrating. How hard can it be to open a text file stored on the disk drive? It turns out that it can be a lot harder than you might think. I've just spent the last quarter of an hour trying to open a text file and it was harder than it should have been.

The problem was that the file, a plain text document with a .txt file extension, had been created on Windows. I can't remember whether it was in Microsoft Office or LibreOffice, but it had been saved as plain text as a .txt file. I wanted to open it on my Mac and that's where things started to go wrong.

Double clicking the .txt file opened it in the default application, which is TextEdit. Now TextEdit is a handy little word processor/text editor, but it messed up the file. The problem was that dashes (-) and apostrophes ('), and possibly other characters too, came out as foreign letters with accents, making the document all wrong. Changing the font didn't help and there didn't appear to be any way of correctly loading it. I suppose I could have copied the characters, pasted them into a search box and replaced them, but I wanted to open it correctly in the first place. TextEdit couldn't do it.

I tried TextWrangler, which is really a programmer's text editor, but seeing as it was plain text anyway, I tried it. It was wrong. I then tried Bean, a handy word processor that requires little disk space or memory, which is useful. On opening the text file a window appeared asking which character set I wanted to use. There was a pop-up list of character sets and a preview box showing the text. It didn't take long to work out that Western (Windows latin 1) was the one that was required. Selecting this opened the text file correctly.

I wondered what LibreOffice on my Mac would make of this plain text file. That turned out to be harder than expected too. Right clicking the file and selecting Open With, LibreOffice would only allow me to import it into a spreadsheet. On the plus side, it did recognise that it wasn't a standard file and it offered a list of character sets to choose from and a preview pane to show what it looked like.

To get LibreOffice to open a plain text file in LibreOffice Writer isn't that obvious. You have to start LibreOffice and click Open. In the Open dialog click All Files and there is a long list of file types. You have to ignore the obvious Text Documents entry and scroll further down the list. The file types are then organised by application. You have to select Text Encoded in the text document section and not the spreadsheet section. What's more, you have to select Text Encoded and not just Text. Selecting Text, even in the word processor section still opens it as a spreadsheet with every word in a different cell. You must choose Text Encoded. It is then opened in the word processor and you have a choice of character sets.

Sometimes things are harder than they should be.