Cannot open a Word98 Document

[Nathan]

I saved my document yesterday at 4:00. I think that Word quit
before it was done repaginating or saving. Anyway at 6:00 I
couldn't open the document. It will open up to the first page, but it
freezes. I have tried the recovery features and have been able to
recover it as any readable information,but I have marked about
18,000 index entries, and it did not correctly recover these. Is
there something else I can do?

 

[Ramón G Castañeda]

I saved my document yesterday at 4:00. I think that Word quit
before it was done repaginating or saving. Anyway at 6:00 I
couldn't open the document. It will open up to the first page, but it
freezes. I have tried the recovery features and have been able to
recover it as any readable information,but I have marked about
18,000 index entries, and it did not correctly recover these. Is
there something else I can do?

Nathan,

Without any further information, here's a shot in the dark.

Because you are dealing with a complex document (judging by your 18,000
index entries) it could well be a memory problem --among many other possible
causes.

Make sure you allocate a bunch of RAM to Word, as much as you can spare.
Also, make sure you have enough free hard disk space (for temp files, etc.).

The bad news is that, because the application quit before saving, the
document may have become irreparably damaged. You're lucky to have
recovered the text, if I understand correctly.

Best of luck.

 

[Beth Rosengard]

Nathan,

Without any further information, here's a shot in the dark.

Because you are dealing with a complex document (judging by your 18,000
index entries) it could well be a memory problem --among many other possible
causes.

Make sure you allocate a bunch of RAM to Word, as much as you can spare.
Also, make sure you have enough free hard disk space (for temp files, etc.).

The bad news is that, because the application quit before saving, the
document may have become irreparably damaged. You're lucky to have
recovered the text, if I understand correctly.

Best of luck.

Hi Nathan,

Ramon's suggestion makes sense. If you don't know how to raise Word's
memory, here's the procedure:

Navigate to the Word application in the Finder, select it and Get Info
(Command i). Go to the Memory pane and try upping Word's Preferred memory
in increments of 5000K (leave Minimum memory alone). We usually recommend a
Preferred memory setting of 48000K in Word 2001 but you may not need that
much in Word 98. Be sure Virtual Memory is turned on in Control
Panels> Memory.

Also, have you checked the Mactopia.com download page for all the
recommended Office 98 updaters (at least the Combined Updater and the
Security updaters)? If not, you need to do so. Download them from the
following site and once installed, rebuild your desktop.

<http://www.microsoft.com/mac/download/default.asp?navindex=s10#Office98>

--
Beth Rosengard
Mac MVP

Mac Word FAQ: <http://www.mvps.org/word/FAQs/WordMac/index.htm>
Entourage Help Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org/toc.html>