can't open document

M

Melanie

Working in Microsoft 10.1.4 on my Mac, twice now in two days on two
separate documents I have put in several hours editing the formatting,
occassionally opening and closing the document, saving often!, opening
and closing other docs to copy text from, even restarting the machine.
Things seem to be working just fine, but then all of a sudden, after
closing the document without any error warnings, I can't open it
again. Says, "Word failed reading from this file, cancel or retry".

Any ideas why this is happening? Better yet, how I might recover the
doc?
 
D

Dayo Mitchell

Did you retry, and it continued to fail?

Try using File | Open, to open the file, and if that doesn't work initially,
try using File | Open with Recover Text from Any File selected, which may at
least recover portions.

It sounds possible that your Normal template is corrupted, since this
happened on two separate documents--that's the basis for all new
docs--you'll find a lot of trouble-shooting suggestions at this link:
http://word.mvps.org/MacWordNew/TroubleshootingIndex.htm
(hit refresh a few times in Safari, or use a different browser)
But I would start with the page on the Normal template, although since this
is an intermittent error and you won't be sure it's fixed, it might be worth
working through several of the troubleshooting suggestions as general
maintenance, including the suggestions re OS X maintenance under Repair Disk
Permissions.
 
J

John McGhie

Hi Melanie:

Yes, sadly I think Dayo is right. Your Normal Template has a corruption,
probably in the Bullets and Numbering (have you been playing with Numbering
or Bullet formatting? That will do it...).

Once a document corruption gets to a certain point, Word can't open the
file: Recover Text is the only way.

I suggest that you Quit Word and re-name your Normal template. Word will
create a fresh clean new one automatically when it re-starts. You can then
use Organiser to copy your valuable bits across from the old one if you
wish. But do not copy any text or you are likely to copy the corruption!

Cheers


Working in Microsoft 10.1.4 on my Mac, twice now in two days on two
separate documents I have put in several hours editing the formatting,
occassionally opening and closing the document, saving often!, opening
and closing other docs to copy text from, even restarting the machine.
Things seem to be working just fine, but then all of a sudden, after
closing the document without any error warnings, I can't open it
again. Says, "Word failed reading from this file, cancel or retry".

Any ideas why this is happening? Better yet, how I might recover the
doc?

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410
 

Ask a Question

Want to reply to this thread or ask your own question?

You'll need to choose a username for the site, which only take a couple of moments. After that, you can post your question and our members will help you out.

Ask a Question

Top