Document went crazy-what could be happening?

[Benny]

I'm using Word 2003, Win XP Pro.
Working on my 300 page document, 3MB size, at around page 200. Suddenly the
pages begin to scroll, the cursor seems to be jumping backward at high speed
through the text, the hourglass figure keeps flashing, and the document
eventually scrolls back to page 1, at which point Word freezes.
On restart, autorecover worked fine, but it gave me a big fright. I was
typing at the time, and there's always a chance I hit the wrong key, but
surely there's not a command you would hit even by accident that says "Go
Berserk and then Crash"?
Do I just accept this as a quaint phenomenon of word processing, or is there
something I need to know that would help prevent this kind of thing
happening again?

 

[Doug Robbins - Word MVP]

Your document is not overly large, but documents can get corrupted. For
starters, I would make sure that you have a backup copy of the document, and
make regular backups. Quite often, the problem may be able to be overcome
by copying everything but the final paragraph mark and pasting it into a new
document.

--
Please post any further questions or followup to the newsgroups for the
benefit of others who may be interested. Unsolicited questions forwarded
directly to me will only be answered on a paid consulting basis.

Hope this helps
Doug Robbins - Word MVP

 

[Cindy M -WordMVP-]

Hi Benny,

Chances are, something "went critical" in the document - damaged the binary
file structure.

This can happen in Word documents. Luckily Word 2002 and 2003 have excellent
recovery tools that also manage to repair the damaged sections fairly well.
You should make frequent backups, however. And if this happens again, you
should probably take the time to reconstruct the file structures:
- create a new document (from the original template, if there is such a
thing)
- copy the text - WITHOUT the section breaks or the last paragraph mark -
into the new document
- you'll need to recreate and reformat all the sections, including headers
and footers

I'm using Word 2003, Win XP Pro.
Working on my 300 page document, 3MB size, at around page 200. Suddenly the
pages begin to scroll, the cursor seems to be jumping backward at high speed
through the text, the hourglass figure keeps flashing, and the document
eventually scrolls back to page 1, at which point Word freezes.
On restart, autorecover worked fine, but it gave me a big fright. I was
typing at the time, and there's always a chance I hit the wrong key, but
surely there's not a command you would hit even by accident that says "Go
Berserk and then Crash"?
Do I just accept this as a quaint phenomenon of word processing, or is there
something I need to know that would help prevent this kind of thing
happening again?

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

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