Find and Replace cause Word to crash again and again

[CyberTaz]

Hi John -

Hi Patricio:

Command + A? To Repeat Find?

I would be disappointed if it did NOT Select All. I must have missed
something, but Command + A is the default assignment for Select All.

Repeat Find is F4?

Cheers

Not to Repeat a Find...

He means -while- the F&R dialog is displayed in the foreground - Cmd+A is
supposed to "switch" it's assignment to Replace All instead of Select All.

I've experienced it *once* in some of the testing I've been doing, so I have
confirmed what he's reporting but I haven't been able to determine what
caused it nor can I force it to occur. I'm trying to construct a bug report,
but it's one of those vaporous issues that makes it hard to formulate any
"steps to reproduce" - without which bugging won't get much attention:-(

Regards |:>)
Bob Jones
[MVP] Office:Mac

 

[etcstgo]

Hi Patricio:

Command + A?  To Repeat Find?

I would be disappointed if it did NOT Select All.  I must have missed
something, but Command + A is the default assignment for Select All.

To quote myself: "...so that pressing Command-A to Replace All does a
Select All in the document window instead".

With the Find and Replace window frontmost, Command-A is the shortcut
for "Replace All", not a default assignment for "Select All".

Try it sometime, you'll like it.

Patricio Mason
Santiago, Chile

 

[etcstgo]

I've experienced it *once* in some of the testing I've been doing,

That sounds like a seriously corrupted document! :-D

Sorry, couldn't resist.

so I have confirmed what he's reporting but I haven't been able to determine what
caused it nor can I force it to occur. I'm trying to construct a bug report,
but it's one of those vaporous issues that makes it hard to formulate any
"steps to reproduce" - without which bugging won't get much attention:-(

Good to know I wasn't seeing things, after all. As I said when I said
"randomly", I too haven't been able to discern a pattern yet.

But wait, this is not all. It gets better:

Typically after a global Find and Replace, certain key combinations
will randomly become unresponsive. These include the arrow, modifier
(Command, Option, Shift, Control), Page Up/Page Down, and Home/End
keys. Pressing combinations of these (such as Shift-Command-Arrow key
or Command-Home) does nothing at all. Keys such as Option and Shift
still work in combination with letter keys, however.

Command-F works, for example. In fact, bringing the Find window to the
front clears the problem and all the above keys become responsive
again -until the next Find and Replace. Qutiing and restarting Word
will clear the problem for a good while, but it eventually comes back.

I first noticed this behavior a few weeeks ago when working on a
complex, 99-page document full of graphics, charts and tables, so I
chalked it up to that and/or to some setting that needed tweaking. But
my work was suffering, so instead of investigating further I just went
back to Word 2004 to complete my work. However, I have since seen the
same problem with harmless, two-page documents containing nothing but
text.

I have tried:

1. Removing both the 2004 and 2008 Normal templates to the desktop so
Word can create a brand-new Normal template.
2. Trashing com.microsoft.office.plist and com.microsoft.Word.plist.
3. Removing Microsoft Office 2008 Settings.plist from the Office 2008
folder (which curiously enough didn't get recreated).
4. Working on .doc and .docx versions of the same document.
5. Doing a Find and Replace on several other unrelated documents,
which produces the same results.

I do not have a bad keyboard. If I switch to any other open
application, these key combinations work. Switch back to Word, and
they don't.

Patricio Mason
Santiago, Chile

 

[Chris Kuhn]

This sounds very similar to the problem I have been having with the "compare
documents" function. On some documents, it will crash Word.

I don't doubt it may be caused by a corrupt document.

How do I fix a corrupt document?

[Sorry, if I missed it in an earlier post. I did a search in Entourage on
"corrupt" and found nothing.]

Chris Kuhn

 

[John McGhie]

Nup! I use F4, Command + A Selects all

To quote myself: "...so that pressing Command-A to Replace All does a
Select All in the document window instead".

With the Find and Replace window frontmost, Command-A is the shortcut
for "Replace All", not a default assignment for "Select All".

Try it sometime, you'll like it.

Patricio Mason
Santiago, Chile

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Sydney, Australia. mailto:[email protected]

 

[etcstgo]

Nup!  I use F4, Command + A Selects all

You can customize your keyboard shortcuts any way you like, but that
doesn't mean that everyone else is using the same key assignments.
Furthermore, under Apple GUI guidelines Command-All is not the default
for "Select All"; it's the default for "All', whatever it happens to
be. Example: in Word's own Accept or Reject Tracked Changes window,
Command-All is the shorcut for "Accept All" --and so on and so forth.

With a modal window frontmost set to accept "Command-All" as a shorcut
for an action specific to it, there is no reason (and no precedent)
for "Command-All" to trigger another action in the window underneath.

"Command-All" has worked as advertised through many iterations of
Word; it doesn't in Word 2008. In other words, it's a -gasp- bug.

Patricio Mason
Santiago, Chile

 

[CyberTaz]

Hey John -

Nup! I use F4, Command + A Selects all

I've got to side with Patricio on this one, especially since Apple
commandeered F4 as an Exposè operator. But even if that weren't the case:

By default F4 in Mac Word is associated with the EditPaste command, so you
may very well have reassigned it somewhere along the line [or perhaps you've
been dabbling a bit too much on the Dark Side lately?]. SHIFT+F4 is assigned
to RepeatFind but only works when the Find & Replace dialog is not
displayed. It doesn't call up the F&R window, either, but repeats/continues
the last Find performed... the equivalent of the Browse Object button's
operation to Find Next.

Regards |:>)
Bob Jones
[MVP] Office:Mac

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Chris, that is not a similar problem at all. Compare Documents is
totally different from Find and Replace. To think that because Word
crashes in both instances makes it a similar problem is kinda like
saying two people are identical because they both live in the United States.

Corrupt doc fixes:
http://word.mvps.org/Mac/DocumentCorruption.html

 

[John_S]

Back to the original post and the first few replies.

I'm using MacOffice 2008 on an iMac (PowerPC G5, Leopard [10.5.2]).

I have been experiencing exactly the same crashing phenomenon after running a Search + Replace command in a long (200+ page) document containing only text. This problem is NOT isolated and not unique to documents containing tables or graphics.

Whether the issue relates to OSX or to Word 2008, I find myself kind of lost here. Everyone but me seems to be an expert user. I am not an expert user, and I find it terribly difficult to locate solutions that my minimal competence allows me to try.

- If my document is corrupt, how do I fix it (permanently)?
- If the problem relates to OSX or Spaces, how do I prevent crashes in the future.

I will be happy to try the solutions proposed here and report back.

 

[kyuuta6]

John S,

So did you try <http://word.mvps.org/mac/Diagnose.html> as suggested?

 

[John McGhie]

Hi John:

Send me a copy of that document to (e-mail address removed) and let me have a look
at it. Before advising you, I want to see what's wrong with it.

Cheers

Back to the original post and the first few replies.

I'm using MacOffice 2008 on an iMac (PowerPC G5, Leopard [10.5.2]).

I have been experiencing exactly the same crashing phenomenon after running a
Search + Replace command in a long (200+ page) document containing only text.
This problem is NOT isolated and not unique to documents containing tables or
graphics.

Whether the issue relates to OSX or to Word 2008, I find myself kind of lost
here. Everyone but me seems to be an expert user. I am not an expert user, and
I find it terribly difficult to locate solutions that my minimal competence
allows me to try.

- If my document is corrupt, how do I fix it (permanently)?
- If the problem relates to OSX or Spaces, how do I prevent crashes in the
future.

I will be happy to try the solutions proposed here and report back.

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Sydney, Australia. mailto:[email protected]

 

[AH]

I need help on this too! Installed Office 2007 on DELL PC and crashes every
time I use "find" function in Word, whether the doc is a ".doc" or ".docx."
WTF?! I can't get any work done!

 

[Gary Goldberg]

You need to ask this question in a PC newsgroup devoted to Word
problems. This is a Mac group.