by Dr. Uwe Wächter
Office documents can be structured in such a way that they do not reveal their entire content immediately. In other words, embedded files can be “hidden” in Office documents. For archiving purposes, embedded files must be backed up to make sure information is not lost – at any time. Unfortunately, archiving Office documents by themselves is not a solution because archiving cannot take place in an application format. The working documents must be converted into a visually identical, standardized, long-term and revision-proof file format. In other words, any information visible in the working document must also be visible in the archived document, including embedded files.
PDF/A can meet this requirement.
In the following blog, we will show you how to archive Office documents and embedded files with our Enterprise Conversion Server.
Office files can contain other objects or files. The “in Place” envelope application can be used to edit the following objects:
Files are simply embedded and when you try to edit them, the operating system decides on the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) type and which processing is possible.
A typical example is embedding Excel in Word.
However, there are three ways to embed files:
Paste (option 1) creates a copy in Word. The numbers can then still be changed, but nothing is calculated anymore.
If the second option is selected (Paste Special), an additional dialog box appears. Afterwards, editing within Word is possible.
Also, when you use Paste Special, you can even find the original formulas again by opening “in Place” in an Excel spreadsheet. The Excel object or the file, if you like, is now located in Word.
The final, and third option, is Paste as Hyperlink. In this option, Word recognizes the path to an external file. In the case of archiving, this procedure makes no sense at all.
And it works analogously with all other applications that MS Office can manage “in Place” (see above).
Here is an example with a graphical visualization from Excel, presented in Word:
This Word file is to be archived as PDF/A.
One could have expected that the numbers and formulas would also be found in PDF/A. Unfortunately, the information has been lost.
Another frequently used method to link files to each other is this one: A Word file points to an icon … to another Word file.
For this method, the conversion to PDF/A-1 (within the Enterprise Conversion Server) terminates with an error. However, a conversion to PDF/A-2 can solve this problem. Many PDF/A creators, including MS Office PDF/A export, only display the Word icon, but the interaction is lost. PDF/A-2 allows the embedding of additional PDF/A files. The Enterprise Conversion Server leaves the Word icon active when converting the first Word file to PDF/A and after converting the second Word file, the link is restored. By the way, our Enterprise Conversion Server is the only tool in the world that can do this!
With version MS Office 2010 or higher, there are interactive test options to track down embedded objects..
Further information about our Enterprise Conversion Server can be found here.
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