text encoding dialog box

Question

MS Word for Mac 2011 - Can I get rid of that annoying text encoding dialog box every time I open a plain text file? Unchecking the confirm box in General preferences doesn't seem to work.

Answer 1

The only way I have found to do this is to use a VBA macro to open the (old?) file open dialog. This seems to bypass the encoding checks. 

The macro I have is

Sub openWithoutEncodingDialog()

' Using VBA seems to suppress the dialog.

' the value of COnfirmCOnversions may be irrelevant to

' the behaviour, so if you want to use the default value,

' leave that parameter out.

' NB, some people just do this as "With Word.Dialogs(wdDialogFileOpen)"

Dim dlg As Word.Dialog

Set dlg = Word.Dialogs(wdDialogFileOpen)

With dlg

If .Show() <> 0 Then

Application.Documents.Open fileName:=.Name, ConfirmConversions:=False

' we ought to be able to specify addtorecentfiles:=True in the above but it

' does not appear to work, so do it separately

Application.RecentFiles.Add .Name

End If

End With

Set dlg = Nothing

End Sub

I would probably put the macro into Normal.dotm or another suitable template, and use Tools->View Toolbars->Customize Toolbars and Menus...->Commands, select category "Macros", and drag the macro onto a menu or toolbar in addition to the standard file open, and just use it for "special" opens such as text files. Or assign the macro to a keystroke But that's just because I don't like to disturb the way the standard options function.

Windows Word has a bunch of encoding-related stuff including a DefaultFileEncoding setting which may affect this behaviour on Win. But Mac doesn't appear to have any of that stuff. It may be possible to set a value in a Preference file, but if so, I don't know what it would be.