Failure to correctly export a file from a project in Déjà Vu can happen in various ways, and for each of these ways the causes will be different.

Possible ways an export can fail

Déjà Vu exported the document, but when it is opened it looks wrong, or it can't be opened at all.

This can happen for various reasons:

• The most common cause of this is the presence of incorrectly placed tags. The project should be checked for problems with the tags.
• There was an empty or untranslated segment in the project. If you left a segment untranslated and attempted to export, the resulting file may lack not just the text but also important formatting information that is needed for it to be usable.
• If you are using a filter to export the document that is different from the one you used to import it, the export may produce an unusable document. You can see what filter is currently assigned to a document by viewing the file's Filter Properties. You should use the same filter for import and export.
• If the file is an XML based format file, the filter may be setup to make Déjà Vu export special characters as entities. This may make the files unreadable by some programs. Read more about this here.
• If the file is an SDLXLIFF file produced by Trados Studio, you must take certain precautions before importing; otherwise, the exported file may not work with Trados.

Déjà Vu will not export the document, and I get an error message or a dialog box.

This can happen for various reasons:

• It could be caused by incorrectly placed tags as seen above, particularly if the files documents being exported are Office documents.
• If there are empty or untranslated segments in the project, Déjà Vu will ask you for confirmation before continuing. You can tell it to go ahead, but this may cause problems, as seen above.
• If you are using a filter to export the document that is different from the one you used to import it, the export may produce an unusable document. You can see what filter is currently assigned to a document by viewing the file's Filter Properties. You should use the same filter for import and export.
• If the file was imported with an XML filter and that filter is no longer available. If you moved, deleted or renamed the filter file, or you renamed the folder it is in, Déjà will not be able to find it and will ask you for one. This happens often if you receive such a project from someone else but that person does not send you the filter they used to import the documents.
• If it is an Office 2007 or 2010 document. On some installations the folder the Office2007 filter is placed in differs from the default location Déjà Vu expects. In this case, Déjà Vu will ask you to tell it where the filter definition file is before continuing with the export.
• If the file you imported is an Office document with a file name that contains characters not found in Western alphabets (e.g. Cyrillic or Hebrew) and you are using an outdated version of Déjà Vu X2, it may not be able to export it. You should update your installation of Déjà Vu.

Déjà Vu will not export the document, it just hangs.

This can happen if you are exporting a document created in Office, such as an Excel Spreadsheet or a PowerPoint presentation. To export these files Déjà Vu needs to open an instance of the appropriate Office application and run a macro; sometimes the application will pop up a dialog window informing the user of something, and require the user to close the dialog window before continuing running the macro. However, in order not to clutter the user's interface, Déjà Vu keeps these instances of Office hidden, so the dialog window in question will not be visible. Usually, when this happens, there is a new item on the Windows Taskbar signifying the instance of Office that has brought up the dialog window, so it can be found and closed by looking at the Taskbar.

One reason Office may be outputting a message is if the Macro Security setting is set too high, and this causes Office to output a warning every time Déjà Vu attempts to run a macro to help export the project. If this happen, you need to reduce the Macro Security setting.

If you can't find the cause of the export error

If you are unable to determine exactly why the file you are trying to export will not, or you are in a hurry and do not wish to spend the time it takes to diagnose the issue, you can re-import the file. This can be effective is the cause of the export error is a special circumstance that was in effect when you first imported the document; in this case, by importing again you will avoid that. It is also effective if the document is an XML file that was first imported using a defective our outdated XML filter.