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AlternateContent in Word

Anonymous
2019-10-01T08:37:56+00:00

Recently, had another instance of corrupted Word doc, but was able to recover by manually balancing the XML tags, i.e.<mc:AlternateContent> and related tags.

Sorry, not sure of the Word version the problem docx file came from.

Two questions:

  1. What is this code for?  Is it Word's implementation of "Alternate Text"?
  2. Is there a way to universally toggle the "Fallback"option,  so as to view the entire document as if Fallback were always chosen.  In  this case, the choices are dependent on "wpg" and "wps".
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  1. Doug Robbins - MVP - Office Apps and Services 323.1K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2019-10-01T22:02:46+00:00

    As far as I know, the mc:AlternateContent has nothing to do with AltText.

    I have already told you what I perceive to be the best steps for avoiding the issue.

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  2. Doug Robbins - MVP - Office Apps and Services 323.1K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2019-10-01T10:04:16+00:00

    I believe that the errors caused by those situations can occur in all versions of Word and for that reason they should be avoided and if they are, the mis-matched xml tag errors are less likely to occur.

    I am not prepared to say that they will then never occur, but of the scores of documents that I have repaired, it was always one or another of those situations that caused the error.

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  3. Doug Robbins - MVP - Office Apps and Services 323.1K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2019-10-01T08:52:29+00:00

    In my experience of repairing Word documents with such mis-matched xml tag errors, the error is usually associated with one or more of the following:

    • images\textboxes inserted with the layout other than "In-Line with Text"
    • multiple images inserted inside a shape, probably in an effort to group them.
    • images that have been overlaid with text, or other objects such as arrows or other shapes

    In almost all cases, the first two of the above can be eliminated by the use of a table with images inserted into the cells with the layout set to In-Line with text

    In the third case, I recommend construction such "compound" images in a separate document and then using a screen capture utility such as Snagit from www.techsmith.com, and save the screen capture as a image which can be inserted into the document and so avoid the used of "compound" images in that document.

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  4. Anonymous
    2019-10-01T20:12:29+00:00

    So, as to question 1, this use of AlternateContent is probably not related to "Alternate text".  OK

    But question 2, can "Fallback" be forced in some way?

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  5. Anonymous
    2019-10-01T09:12:40+00:00

    Thanks for the quick response!  i will check for those conditions later - when i next have access to Word.  Are the causes you mentioned fixed in later Word version?

    And do you know how to force the fallbacks to be used?

    thanks!

    bc

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