Corrupt document, Cursor unresponsive, OS 9.2, Word 97-98

[Ariana Smart]

I was in the midst of doing lots of style formatting to a 200 page,
Microsoft Word 97-98 Document. It froze. I Forced Quit. I reopened it. In
the first few seconds of it being open I can click on the document,
selecting text, accessing pull down menus, etc., but then the cursor becomes
non responsive. I then have to Force Quit to get out of Word.

Other documents in Word are fine, so it's just this one.

By working quickly in that few second grace period right when I open the
document, I tried to Save As RTF, but it froze while it was saving. The
next time I opened it I tried to select all, copy and paste into a new
document, but the clipboard was too big.

I tried duplicating the document and opening that, but same problems.

At this point I don't mind if I lose all formatting, I just want the text.

Thanks.

 

[Dayo Mitchell]

The first way to check for a corrupt document is to
copy the entire thing, *excluding* the last paragraph mark, into a new
document. That last paragraph mark (click on ¶ on the standard toolbar to
show marks) holds a lot of information which can get corrupted, and copying
the text into a document with a fresh one keeps your formatting, but can fix
some glitches. If you have section breaks, do this for each section.

To just recover the text, you could try using File | Open with the dialog
set to Recover Text from Any File.

See this link for further info:

http://www.mvps.org/word/FAQs/AppErrors/CorruptDoc.htm

DM

 

[Beth Rosengard]

Hi Ariana,

In addition to what Dayo said, it's possible that increasing the Preferred
memory assigned to Word 98 may help. 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.

--
Beth Rosengard
Mac MVP

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