Why are my legacy DOC and XLS files failing to convert?

If you are running into problems while converting legacy DOC and XLS files, but the more modern DOCX and XLSX files are converting fine, then one of the following may be wrong:

1. Document Information Panels are active on the Document / Document Library.

2. The file depends on external resources that are stored in SharePoint / UNC path, e.g. a shared template (.dot) file.

As the more modern DOCX and XLSX files are based on an open standard our software automatically modifies these files before conversion. However, we cannot do the same for the older files types without introducing some formatting problems.

The easiest solution is to re-save these files in Office 2007 format (or newer), however if this is not possible then the following may solve the problem:

1. You can specify in the document library / MS-Word to hide the Document Information Panel by default.

2. To allow external content to be accessed during conversion, configure Windows’ AuthForwardServerList.