Translation Import "Not a valid Word document" error

Mar 12, 2018

I have a pr0ject in Storyline 2 which I need to translate into 20 different languages. So far with every translation file I've tried I get the error "Not a valid Word document" when attempting to import.

I searched the forums and see this issue has been encountered before, so I've already verified that:

both my *.story file and the translation files are on my local drive and not a networked folder
The Word document to be imported is saved in the *.doc file type
The Word document to be imported does not have any special characters in the file name
I've also moved the Word document to my desktop to ensure the shortest file path possible
The document is not read-only

I asked a colleague who also has Storyline 2 to attempt the process and she encountered the exact same error.

Can anyone recommend what else I can do to get this to work?

5 Replies

Alyssa Gomez
Staff

6 years ago03/13/18 at 3:49 pm (UTC)

Hi there Heidi,

Thanks so much for letting us know what you've already tried! You came to the right place for help.

Would you mind sending us the Word Document through this link? I'd like our team to take a closer look at it and test importing it into Storyline 2.

Thanks!

Dave Hansen

6 years ago03/15/18 at 3:55 pm (UTC)

Thanks, Alyssa.

We have run into this a few times as well, and I would love to see your recommended workaround.

@Heidi - It sounds like these are your translated files that are ready to be reimported. Is that right?

Sometimes, we have seen that other organizations create alignment issues between the variables and text fields in these Storyline translation tables as they translate due to their manual processes. This may be a root cause for the issue.

If these are the English content export files, you may want to try to open the file in Wordpad and then copying and pasting the content back into a Word document. See if that helps. You can also try to do the same thing in Excel to preserve the formatting. You'll need to review the Excel file to merge cells that unmerge in the import process (if it works). Each row in the ,doc file will become a separate row in the Excel document, so you'll need to do some post editing to ensure the alignment remains correct.

You can then copy and paste it all back into a clean .doc file to see if that eliminates the corruption.

Sorry to hear about your troubles.

Hope that helps.

Dave

PS: if you have more questions, you can ping me at daveh (a) inwhatlanguage.com. I'll connect you with a few of our Storyline engineering experts, who may have more ideas to share.

Alyssa Gomez
Staff

6 years ago03/16/18 at 5:55 pm (UTC)

Hi Dave,

Thanks so much for sharing those tips here! I don't have a specific workaround, since this file error can pop up for different reasons. When this happens, the best thing to do is to reach out to our Support Engineers with the Word document, and we'll take a closer look at it.