Avoiding corrupt files by saving as .rtf or .xml ?

[Thierry-Fr]

Every day or so we have damaged Word files. We know how to repair them with
"Open and Repair" but wish we could avoid that. We have tried many things
(disable fast saving, etc) with no success.

So I thought about storing the files in .rtf ou .xml format instead of .doc
(we are using Word 2003).

Do you think this may be a good idea? Is "corruption" only limited to .doc
files or can it happen just as often with "text" formats like rtf or xml?

Note that our files contain only text with styles (no images or objects).
They are produced using VBA macros stored in a .dot template.

 

[Terry Farrell]

Doc files should not corrupt easily. It is usually something else that
causes the problem such as saving to removable media or a bad network drive.
Sometimes it may be due to having a third party add-in that is forcing a
customised save macro. You need to investigate the cause and not find a
workaround to the problem. Word 2003 running under Windows 2003 was about
the most stable combination that MS produced and is usually reliable.

 

[Thierry-Fr]

Thank you for your answer !

I have already spent a lot of time investigating the problem, so a
workaround would be fine to me... I don't see a reason why we should use DOC
files instead of RTF or WordML files (besides, the 30-50 files produced every
day are eventually concatenated into one big WordML file and fed to an XML
processor).

Your suggestion about the network drive is interesting and I'll try using
another network drive. Of course it's a little delicate since this kind of
problem only happens in the production environment...