Comments randomly disappear and reappear in Reviewing Pane in Word 2003

[dedawson]

With Office 2003 SP1, I frequently experience a problem in Word in
which comments whose reference marks appear in the main body of a
document suddenly disappear from the open reviewing pane. There are
two parts to this problem.

Part 1
Assume the reviewing pane is open and the markers for comments 21
through 28 are visible in the main body pane. Clicking between
comments 23 and 24 and adding a new comment opens a new, blank comment
24 in the reviewing pane. As I enter the text for this comment, the
entire comment is suddenly removed form the display and the reviewing
pane now shows comment 23 followed by comment 25 (the original comment
24). Meanwhile, in the main body pane the marker for the new comment
24 remains. Mousing around the two panes, and closing and opening the
reviewing pane can sometimes result in the display of the new comment,
but only temporarily. Before I can select it, it vanishes again. The
new comment 24 does exist, and its text can be viewed by hovering the
mouse over its marker in the main body pane, but it cannot be accessed
for editing in the reviewing pane.

I have discovered that I can sometimes regain the ability to view and
edit the comment by expanding the window to full screen. Once I bring
the application back to less than full screen I am subject to the
problem recurring. It should be noted that the only comments that seem
to experience the problems are ones that are being newly added during
this instantiation of Word. Comments added during a previous session
are not effected.

Part 2
There are also cases in which the new blank comment remains displayed,
but as text is being entered, some portion of it vanishes into thin
air, never to be seen again.

If anyone has any insights into the source and, more importantly, the
fix for this problem I would be deeply grateful.

 

[Cindy M -WordMVP-]

Hi Dedawson,

With Office 2003 SP1, I frequently experience a problem in Word in
which comments whose reference marks appear in the main body of a
document suddenly disappear from the open reviewing pane. There are
two parts to this problem.

I've seen things along these lines with the last two versions of Word.
Generally, they've cropped up in documents generated in Word 2000 or
earlier, or created from Word 2000 or earlier templates, or in
(slightly) damaged documents.

If you copy all but the last paragraph mark of such a problem file
into a new Word document, generated from a Word 2003 Normal.dot file,
does the comment-display settle down?

If not, or if you're also seeing this new documents, created from a
Word 2003-generated template, then I'd try updating the graphics card
driver.

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 8 2004)
http://www.word.mvps.org

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[dedawson]

Hi Cindy,

Thanks for your thoughts.

The document in question came from another division of our company,
whose knowledge of and use of Word is, at best, shall we say
'challenged'. From the looks of things, it was created by cutting and
pasting text from a number of other documents, so there's no telling
how many different versions of Word have been stirred into it. The fact
that the ActiveDocument.ListTemplates.Count is 192 tells me its been
around the block a few times. I would not be the least bit surprised
if this is in some contributing to the problem.

All documents we create here are based upon templates we have built
using VBA to provide named list templates for keeping our numbering
problems to a minimum. I can't recall having experienced the problem
with documents we have generated in this manner, even though we cut and
paste freely between them. (By the way, thanks to the other MVPs who
suggested building templates from VBA; that is indeed the only way to
go).

As for copying all but the last paragraph mark to a new file based upon
a clean template does not solve the problem. Note, however, that while
copying in this manner leaves behind some types of document problems,
it doesn't leave them all; e.g. the List Templates problems remain.

Looks like I'll have to play around with this document (and a few
others) to see if I can confirm that the problem is being driven by
corruption of the document itself. I suppose if I copy and Paste
Special | Unformatted Text into a new document based upon a clean
template and re-enter the comments without the problem recurring I'll
have my answer. I just hate to have to go through that because the
document is over 200 pages.

It could also be, as you suggested, that its a video driver issue.
Given that I've seen this problem on both old and new boxes (with up to
date drivers and plenty of memory) however, I suspect that its more
likely a Word issue.

In any event, if I'm able to come up with any definitive cause, I'll
post it here.

Thanks again for your time.

david dawson

 

[Cindy M -WordMVP-]

Hi Dedawson,

From the looks of things, it was created by cutting and
pasting text from a number of other documents, so there's no telling
how many different versions of Word have been stirred into it. The fact
that the ActiveDocument.ListTemplates.Count is 192 tells me its been
around the block a few times. I would not be the least bit surprised
if this is in some contributing to the problem.

As for copying all but the last paragraph mark to a new file based upon
a clean template does not solve the problem. Note, however, that while
copying in this manner leaves behind some types of document problems,
it doesn't leave them all; e.g. the List Templates problems remain.

Interesting. Very interesting. That process should drop all list
templates that aren't currently used in the paragraphs copied.

Looks like I'll have to play around with this document (and a few
others) to see if I can confirm that the problem is being driven by
corruption of the document itself. I suppose if I copy and Paste
Special | Unformatted Text into a new document based upon a clean
template and re-enter the comments without the problem recurring I'll
have my answer. I just hate to have to go through that because the
document is over 200 pages.

Well, something else you can try is saving back to another file format,
such as Word 6 RTF, regular RTF, Word's HTML or, with Word 2003, to
Word's native XML format. All of these will tend to retain formatting,
comments, etc. but drop "obvious" document corruption.

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 8 2004)
http://www.word.mvps.org

This reply is posted in the Newsgroup; please post any follow question
or reply in the newsgroup and not by e-mail

 

[dedawson]

Hi Cindy,

Interesting. Very interesting. That process should drop all list
templates that aren't currently used in the paragraphs copied.

But it could be that all those list templates are actually used. If
other folks copied in chunks from other docs with headers that weren't
named, a new set of list templates would have been created. I suppose
I could write a bit of code to evaluate all the items to see if there
really are any that were copied even though they weren't being used.

While I haven't tried saving out to Word XML before, it certainly
sounds like a path that's worth investigating. If worse comes to
worse, I have some VBA that I wrote a while back that I use to clean up
docs with spaghetti'ed list templates. It tags all paragraphs with
text labels indicating their style, then does a Paste Special |
Unformatted Text of the entire document into a new document (so now
everything is Normal) based upon a VBAed template, reads all the text
labels, re-assigns styles based upon the labels and then finally
removes the labels. I still have to go back and do a little clean-up
for items that had direct formatting, but all in all it saves the
ongoing list template aggravation.

Thanks again for the ideas.

david