Exporting Officevision Documents

[Guest.Visitor]

As we understand it, IBM are dropping support for Officevision ("yippee" some would say). This site used Officevision for a few years, but we have now implemented Notes (not on the AS/400). I am therefore going to remove OV/400 from the system. However, we have a few users who have lots of documents (not mail) stored under the Officevision folders. Now the question: Does anyone have a neat or simple way (any way?) of getting these documents of types RFTAS400, FFTAS400, RFTDCA and FFTDCA onto a PC as a text file or such like? I can see the documents with Windows Explorer, but don't have meaningful names, descriptions etc, and it is obviously stored in EBCDIC. Please note that we have lost the OV/400 expertise in IT. Any tips or tricks would be appreciated. Thanks in advance, Russell

[flensburg@novasol.dk]

Hello Russell, You can find some information - and a free utility - here: http://www.as400network.com/resources/ClubTech/index.cfm?fuseaction=ShowNewslett erIssue&ID=8249 Best regards, Carsten Flensburg

[David Abramowitz]

Please see previous articles on this forum relating to your problem. You can perform the "search" function, and come to a rather comprehensive set of instructions. Note: MS Word and Wordperfect will accept OV/400 documents "As-is", as long as they are not in final form (FFT). The text translator for RTF documents comes with the MS Office 2000 CD-Rom, but must be downloaded from the MS Office Web site if you are using Office 97. Dave

[Guest.Visitor]

Carsten and David, Thank you both for responding. I visitted the site nominated by Carson, and retrieved the details, but I now have a question about the character set conversion. The details in the files are definitely stored in EBCDIC, not in ASCII. The results I got on searching the forum mentioned just changing the name of the OV/400 file and opening it with Winword. I tried that, and got a lot of boxes and @ symbols etc, but not a single recognisable line of text. Again, obviously stored in EBCDIC. Note that i only got one thread when I searched on "Officevision AND Conver", and the same thread with "ov AND conver". Any suggestions on other search criteria? Additionally, most (but not all) of the documents are in FFTAS400 which I interpret as Final Format EBCDIC document. Is there something in OV/400 that we run to convert the documents first? Thanks for your help, Russell

[flensburg@novasol.dk]

Russell, I'm not sure what technique you're trying to use - did you encounter any troubles using the batch conversion I referred you to? - If you're trying to carry out the conversion one document at a time and experiencing the problems you mention then you could try the technique described in the document attached below - it worked for me. Best regards, Carsten

[David Abramowitz]

As stated before, MS Word will automatically convert your OV/400 documents. It does not matter that the documents are stored in EBCDIC. All you have to do is open MS Word. Click on open, look in the network for your AS/400 system, click on that, then click on QDLS. A list of folders will appear. Click on a given folder, and a list of documents will appear. Click on the document, and the document will appear in MS Word already formatted. The OV/400 document must be re-saved as draft form rather than final form, and if you must have the "Rich Text Format" text converter installed in MS Word. Dave

[Guest.Visitor]

Tech Tip: Microsoft created a Macro to allow the mass-conversion of documents. Here is the help text from Word 97's help document: <pre>Convert several documents at once 1 Place the documents you want to convert in a single folder. 2 Start the Conversion Wizard. To do this, click Open on the File menu, and change to the Microsoft OfficeOfficeMacros folder. In the Files of type box, click All Files. Double-click Convert8. 3 If the Warning dialog box appears, click Open with Macros. 4 In the Conversion Wizard dialog box, click A batch conversion of files. 5 Follow the directions on the screen to use the Conversion Wizard. Note If you do not have the Convert8.wiz file on your computer, run the Microsoft Word 97 Setup program to install this wizard. After you select the Wizards, templates, and letters check box, select the Macro templates check box. </pre> Bill