How to view a possible Publisher V3 file?

A friend has sent me a file which, having moved to a Win7 PC from XP they cannot open. It may be a trivial file, I don't know.

It has a suffix of .dat but, when viewed as text, contains strings like Quill, Master Page, EschterStm, Micrisoft Publisher 3.0, MSPublisher.3, Quill96 Story Group Class.

So it may be Publisher, despite its file type.

I've tried Publisher 2010 and Publisher V2 but neither can open or view it. I've tried Word but with no success. Only text or hex viewers can show the contents, albeit not in correct form.

Any idea how I can view "in all its glory"?

Not winmail.dat perchance? http://www.lehigh.edu/helpdesk/docs/email-guide/winm...

No, the file name is "Hall 1 RH Door undo bolts notice.dat" so, from the file name, would seem to be the sort of document that would be either a DTP or word processor document.

I bumped into the 'owner' this afternoon and he cannot for the life of him remember what it is.

You could try TrID, but I don't know how effective it is.

There is also DROID.

Edited by micksharpe (Sat 14-Jul-12 18:19:03)

Thanks. TrID returns

Generic OLE2 / Multistream Compound File
Used by various applications of the Microsoft Office suite, for example.

and Droid says

OLE2 Compound Document Format
Version 	 
Other names 	 
Identifiers 	PUID:  fmt/111
Family 	 
Classification 	Text (Structured)
Disclosure 	None
Description 	The OLE2 Compound Document Format is a generic document format
developed by Microsoft as the underlying native binary format for many of its Office
applications. The format is proprietary and Microsoft does not make details of its
structure public. The information here is derived primarily from OpenOffice.org's
reverse-engineered documentation of the format and should not therefore be
regarded as definitive. A Compound Document acts as a file system in which
independent data streams are organised within a hierarchy of containers, called
storages. All storages and streams are contained within a parent Root Storage.
A Directory Stream indexes every stream and storage in the file. A Compound
Document begins with the Compound Document Header, including pointers to the
location of the Directory Stream and Master Sector Allocation Table. The remainder
of the file is organised into Sectors, the positions of which are defined in the
Sector Allocation Table and Master Sector Allocation Table.

So it's clearly a MS Office file. I think I now know where I can try it on a version of MS Office 2003, which I believe refers to its Publisher files as V3. I can change the file type to try various Office apps and see what, if anything, succeeds.

[Edit for better layout]

Edited by cheshire_man (Sat 14-Jul-12 18:46:16)

You may need to open it with the Binder app.

I'll bear that in mind, though I very much doubt that the person concerned would have used MS Binder to combine various documents, he kept things very simple.

In reply to a post by cheshire_man:

Any idea how I can view "in all its glory"?

I wonder if it was an embedded OLE object, such as a Publisher document copied&pasted as an object into Word ??

Rename the file .doc or .docx and or .pub and see??

You may be able to find out more about the files contents with Compound File Explorer (but it's really a developer's tool).

I've renamed the file with .pub, .doc, and even .xls !

With it as .pub both Publisher 2003 and Publisher 2010 open it straight away, and show a completely blank document. As it's only a 14KB file I'm coming to the conclusion that it is a blank Publisher file that has has its file type changed. I've just opened a blank document in Publisher 2010 and saved it, and it's 79KB; downsaving it to Publisher 2000 or Publisher 98 results in a 64KB file.

I've gone back to the friend to ask if he can in any way recall the contents - if any...

Since it is a compound document, it may be linked to another document (i.e. file) rather than having the document embedded in it. If this is the case, the containing document will appear to be empty.

I don't believe it's a compound document (and don't think I said so), the user really doesn't have the knowledge to do such linking or embedding. Checking the hex of the file shows no filename buried in it.

The user has no just come back to me saying there is a print of the notice that the file name refers to (see this post), would you believe it on the hall doors in question , so is happy to recreate it.

Thanks for all the thoughts though, it's given me a useful insight into some more software that's out there.

In reply to a post by cheshire_man:

so is happy to recreate it.

Phew, often the easiest solution with a known time reference. (ie, it will take 30mins to retype) versus XX hours to find a technical solution

I saw him on Monday evening - it's a 12 word notice .

So even at his lack of PC confidence I can't believe it'll take him more than 1 or 2 minutes