Problem solving the 'file is corrupted' in Word problem

[Mike-Monash]

I have just spent half over a day trying to solve an issue in Officer I found - and I am happy to report a solution. I had been using R to create a customised docx file, with ggplot images and Flextable tables, by knitting an rmd file. I wished to combine this with a standard introduction and appendix section (both docx files, created directly in Word) using the body_add_docx function.

But I couldn't - or to be precise, every time I opened up the combined document, I would get the dreaded 'The file is corrupt and cannot be opened' error message in Word (similar to what has been reported in the issues section, ie. #464 ) . If I opened up this file anyway, the resulting Word document did not have the second document included.

I could reproduce all of the supplied examples in the help files just fine, and I was using the latest version of Officer and Officedown.

I really wanted to produce these combined documents, as it would make a huge difference to some projects I am working on. So I pressed on, just kept on trying different things - and can report a solution.

I found that if I imported and then saved a new version of each of the documents using Officer, i.e

read_docx(path = here("Instructions/Report Introduction.docx")) %>%
print(target = here("Instructions/approved_intro.docx"))

I could then combine these 'approved' documents and it would all play nicely:

read_docx(path = here("Instructions/approved_intro.docx")) %>%
body_add_break() %>%
body_add_docx(src=here("Instructions/approved_site_1_plot.docx")) %>%
body_add_break() %>%
body_add_docx(src=here("Instructions/approved_app.docx")) %>%
print(target = here("Outputs/Site word outputs/site_1_combined.docx"))

The new site_1_combined.docx file opens as it should.

Anyway - someone else may benefit from this finding. Otherwise - nice package !