Richard Siddaway's Blog

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I have just spent an extremely frustrating 3 hours trying to figure out why Word 2013 remained minimised on the task bar of my Windows 8 machine. Everything else opened up correctly including other Office applications such as Excel and PowerPoint.

I checked on other machines and it wasn’t the document I was trying to open – later found it was all Word documents – even those coming from my Skydrive.

Tried repairing Office – didn’t work

Looked through the registry – nothing

Tried opening Word through PowerShell – still minimised. Looked through the Word object – nothing.

Tried Internet searches – best option is to maximise through Task Manager – didn’t work. Tried move and size options – nothing.

Just had a brain wave. Yesterday I had an external monitor attached. Switched that on and there is Word in all its glory. Dragged the Window back to my laptop screen and everything works properly now.

So the moral of the story is don’t shut down word on an external monitor unless you want to give yourself an ulcer!

This is a common scenario

$word = New-Object -ComObject "Word.application"            
$word.visible = $true            
$doc = $word.Documents.Add()            
$doc.Activate()            
            
$word.Selection.Font.Name = "Cambria"            
$word.Selection.Font.Size = "20"            
$word.Selection.TypeText("PowerShell")            
$word.Selection.TypeParagraph()            
            
$word.Selection.Font.Name = "Calibri"            
$word.Selection.Font.Size = "12"            
$word.Selection.TypeText("The best scripting language in the world!")            
$word.Selection.TypeParagraph()            
            
$file = "c:\scripts\office\test1.doc"            
$doc.SaveAs([REF]$file)            
            
$Word.Quit()

Create a new Word document – put some text into it and save it with a given file name.  I’ve used it successfully to create server documentation.

Unfortunately with PowerShell v3 it fails with this message

Exception calling "SaveAs" with "1" argument(s): "This is not a valid file name.

Try one or more of the following:

* Check the path to make sure it was typed correctly.

* Select a file from the list of files and folders."

At line:17 char:1

+ $doc.SaveAs([REF]$file)

+ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

    + CategoryInfo          : NotSpecified: (:) [], MethodInvocationException

    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : COMException

It appears not to like the [ref] but if you leave it out you get this

Argument: ‘1’ should be a System.Management.Automation.PSReference. Use [ref].

At line:18 char:1

+ $doc.SaveAs($file)

+ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

    + CategoryInfo          : NotSpecified: (:) [], MethodException

    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : NonRefArgumentToRefParameterMsg

[ref] isn’t case sensitive.

The only way round it that I know of is to create a blank Word document to use as a template

Copy-Item -Path mydoc.doc  -Destination testdoc.doc -Force            
            
$file = "C:\MyData\SkyDrive\Data\Scripts\Office-Word\testdoc.doc"            
            
$word = New-Object -ComObject "Word.application"            
$word.visible = $true            
$doc = $word.Documents.Open($file)            
            
$word.Selection.Font.Name = "Cambria"            
$word.Selection.Font.Size = "20"            
$word.Selection.TypeText("PowerShell")            
$word.Selection.TypeParagraph()            
            
$word.Selection.Font.Name = "Calibri"            
$word.Selection.Font.Size = "12"            
$word.Selection.TypeText("The best scripting language in the world!")            
$word.Selection.TypeParagraph()            
            
$doc.Save()            
$doc.Close()            
$Word.Quit()

Notice that you need to give the full path to the file. Use the Open method and add the text. You can then save, close and quit the application.

I’ve tested this using office 2010 & office 2013 on Windows 7 & 8

Unfortunately we are still left with the problem that we can’t save the Word document into different formats.

This is not a combination I would recommend based on the current preview.  If the experience doesn’t get better before Office 2013 RTMs I won’t be upgrading.  Every time I open a document I get a message that there is a problem with the document. Is there a problem? In reality no.

Trying to open a second Word document and your machine freezes for a while.

I have lost work because of the interaction between Word’s attempts to communicate with SkyDrive and the Skydrive app.

I’ll persevere a bit more but as I don’t have anything like the problems with Office 2010 I may just revert

Office 2013 has the assumption that your SkyDrive is your primary storage area.

Live Essentials supplies an app that allows you to synchronise your PCs with your SkyDrive – it replaces Live Mesh. 

I liked Live Mesh as I could perform peer to peer synchronisation at the folder level.

The new SkyDrive synchronisation only allows a single top level folder and you have to sync through SkyDrive

The interaction between Office 2013 and SkyDrive is not perfect. Office 2013 appears not to understand the SkyDrive and attempts its own synchronisation which doesn’t always work. You are then left with the option to discard your changes or save to another location.

The misunderstandings between SkyDrive and Office 2013 can lead to lost work  – save often!

I haven’t seen as many issues between SkyDrive and Office 2013

This needs to be ironed out before Office 2013 RTMs ideally with a simple option to switch off Office 2013s direct interaction with SkyDrive