Corrupt tables in 2003

[Urban]

How does the tables get corrupted? I have never ever
before had a corrupt table but after starting to use Word
2003 it happens daily and it crashes my files on an hourly
basis. Does anyone know what is going on?

Urban

 

[Cindy M -WordMVP-]

Hi Urban,

How does the tables get corrupted? I have never ever
before had a corrupt table but after starting to use Word
2003 it happens daily and it crashes my files on an hourly
basis.

The "how" is always a bit of a mystery, although I have
created macro code that can consistently "break" a table by
writing information into places where it doesn't belong
(table structures instead of text areas).

If this is happening so consistently, is it happening just in
new documents? Or does it also affect documents created in an
earlier version?

If you rename Normal.dot to NormalOLD.dot does the problem go
away?

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Sep
30 2003)
http://www.mvps.org/word

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[Guest]

Hi Cindy,

Thanks for your help,

I think the problem might have been that some styles used
in this document were set to automatically update. This
document that started to crash was an old document that I
took over. I have over a hundred tables a hundred
equations many figures and cross references. The
interesting thing with this document is that it worked
well using Word 2000, but in Word 2003 it started to fall
apart. I also copied all the tables over to Excel as text
and then pasted back in RTF to get rid of any strange
code.

I will now try it in 2003 again and see what happens.

Urban

 

[Cindy M -WordMVP-]

I think the problem might have been that some styles used

in this document were set to automatically update. This
document that started to crash was an old document that I
took over. I have over a hundred tables a hundred
equations many figures and cross references. The
interesting thing with this document is that it worked
well using Word 2000, but in Word 2003 it started to fall
apart. I also copied all the tables over to Excel as text
and then pasted back in RTF to get rid of any strange
code.

I will now try it in 2003 again and see what happens.

Yes, it sounds like the document may be damaged. It might be
a good idea to:
- copy the text, without section breaks or the last
paragraph mark, into a new document
- do what you've done with the tables to "shake the dust
out". An alternative would also be to use Table/Convert to
Text, then Table/Convert text to table.

What also might work is to simply save the entire document
in Word 2003 as a Web page, open that and save again as a
Word document. With any luck, this will also get rid of the
dust.

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Sep
30 2003)
http://www.mvps.org/word

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