File corruption

[Michelle Loschert]

I am looking for a good resources that explains why & how
word documents become corrupt. Also, some statistics on
how often one could reasonable expect this to happen. And
finally things to do to prevent this from occurring. I am
trying to educate some users that think a corrupt document
every 3 months is unusual.

Thanks

 

[Margaret Aldis]

Hi Michelle

Have a look at

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

How often do you think documents corrupt? Personally, I would think every 3
months would be unusually frequent and might indicate 'dangerous practices'
or unnusually complex documents. This is based on my own experience working
on technical documentation which tends to be fairly large with a lot of
different elements, but uses consistent and automated formatting, avoiding
hand-placed text boxes and other add-hoc 'page painting'.

When I first started helping other users with Word problems, I was presented
with a number of 'corrupt' documents, some of which turned out simply to be
'messy' documents (for instance, the analyst who had been building up
tracked changes in his spec for months but didn't know it because he wasn't
displaying revision marking, or the person who worked all night on a
proposal 'correcting' the ripple of misnumbered headings by going into
Format > Bullets and Numbering and resetting the start number on each one
....).

I saw a lot less problems of all sorts after introducing standardized
templates and custom editing toolbars.

 

[Guest]

When I say corrupt, I am referring to documents that have
pages of bizzare characters:

ì¥Á o@ ð ¿

These are not complex documents. The way the documents
are formatted may be an issue. The origin of the document
is difficult to trace because it is emailed to numerous
individuals for edits.

 

[TF]

I'd say that it is extremely rare. We have around a dozen HEAVY users of
Word who regularly create 50+ page documents and I have NEVER seen this
happen. We do get odd posts in this Newsgroup of it happening, but other
than a virus, there is no reason that it should happen. However, one clue
you give is email. Do you email outside your organisation (e.g. across the
Internet) because that can be a problem? I recommend that you get WinZip and
use the 'ZIP and Mail' option to send Office files across the Internet.

--
Terry Farrell - Word MVP
http://www.mvps.org/word/

When I say corrupt, I am referring to documents that have
pages of bizzare characters:

ì¥Á o@ ð ¿

These are not complex documents. The way the documents
are formatted may be an issue. The origin of the document
is difficult to trace because it is emailed to numerous
individuals for edits.

 

[Guest]

Does emailing across the internet cause the problem? Or
is it the speculation that the recipient could be using a
different word processing software and/or formattting
techniques?