Can't open Word 2003 documents with Word 2002

[Caro]

One of our suppliers cannot open the Word documents we send him. We have
Microsoft Office Word 2003 and he has the 2002 version. When he opens our
documents, he gets the following message when he scrolls down to the second
page: "Microsoft has discovered a problem and has to shut down." Our
documents are not corrupted - people within our organisation open them
without a problem.

What can we do?

Thank you,

Caroline

 

[Cindy M.]

Hi Caroline,

One of our suppliers cannot open the Word documents we send him. We have
Microsoft Office Word 2003 and he has the 2002 version. When he opens our
documents, he gets the following message when he scrolls down to the second
page: "Microsoft has discovered a problem and has to shut down." Our
documents are not corrupted - people within our organisation open them
without a problem.

What can we do?

Perhaps your documents contain something that is new in Word 2003 and not
available in 2002, so 2002 is having a problem. There are a couple of things
you can try

1) In Tools/Options/Save you should find a setting that will limit Word to
only technology available in a selected earlier version of Word (you can
choose the version). You can try activating this, then create a new document
(as a test case) and send that to the supplier.

2) Try saving a document to RTF file format, send that and see if the supplier
on the other end can open that.

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 17 2005)
http://www.word.mvps.org

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