Crash on Table Edit

[John Bigelow]

I spent much of the last two weeks at work working on a document in which I
made use of tables to achieve various fomatting - a line with left justified
and right justified text - several lines with columns of vertically alligned
text - that sort of thing.

All went well - for a while.

But, then as we got close to the deadline for finishing with this document I
encountered a problem. Whenever I tried to edit the structure of one of
these tables or delete one, Word would crash. "Word has encountered a
problem and neeeds to close . . . ." When I restarted with the repaired
document, there were no repairs to see, but there was a message that that the
file had incluced a "date integrity error."

I was using Word 2003 on a computer with Windows XP SP2.

One additional clue: The file had been processed by the "Remove Hidden
Information" tool from Microsoft.

Does anybody have any ideas about: i) What caused this, or ii) How to fix it?

John

 

[Herb Tyson [MVP]]

It sounds like the file has become corrupted. Before trying these
suggestions, please make a backup copy of the original file. It *is*
possible to go from bad to worse. ;-)

I'm assuming it can still be opened. One possible way to fix it would be to
use RTF to "launder" it. Open the file, then save it in RTF format. Close
the file (this is crucial). Open the RTF file. Then save it in Word format.

Because RTF and Word 2003 formatting are so different, this method often can
be used to clean corrupted Word files (assuming they aren't so corrupted
that they can't be opened). Word's binary format can contain errors, but the
RTF format, being a text-based format, doesn't have a mechanism for storing
errors, and hence tends to strip them out.

If that doesn't work, another approach would be to try Word 2003's Open and
Repair option. I confess that I've never actually seen this accomplish
anything useful, but there's always a first time (Word 2007's Open and
Repair seems to be a bit better in this regard). When you choose File -
Open, Open and Repair is one of the options listed when you click Open's
dropdown arrow.