Hi Ellen:
Let's try a simple fix first: Shut down your Mac, turn the power off,
restart it. That causes Unix to clean up its temporary folders. If for
some reason you are out of space in the temp folders, that "might" cause the
problem. But I don't think so: I think you would see a different error
message.
On a system such as you describe, that error message means either "The
document is too complex" or "Some incompatible code is trying to run in
VBA."
The first is much more likely. It is usually caused by leaving Track
Changes turned on but hidden. Look up "Track Changes" in the Word Help
Search, and read each of the topics. Make sure you have turned Track
Changes OFF and that you have Accepted All changes that may be collected in
the documents.
If that does not solve the problem, the documents have corrupted. Make sure
in Word>Preferences>Save that you have "Allow Fast Saves" turned OFF,
because that's what often causes it.
I'll tell you how to fix it in a minute...
However, from your description of the fault affecting more than one
document, chances are the template from which the documents were created has
become corrupt. If you created those documents by copying other documents,
that's the problem. If you created them from templates, the templates need
to be fixed. If you created them as blank documents, the problem is in your
Normal template.
To fix the Normal template, simply find it and re-name it. To find it, look
in Word>Preferences>File Locations. Select "User Templates" and click
"Modify". Word will then show you where the Normal template is stored.
Make a note of the location, and Cancel out of there without making any
changes.
Quit Word (not just minimised) and change the file name of the Normal
template (it doesn't matter what you change it to). When you restart Word,
it will create a new Normal template from its factory defaults.
Now: Create a blank document. Open a problem document. CAREFULLY select
all EXCEPT the last paragraph mark and copy. Paste into the new document,
and save as a new file name. This copies the text but leaves behind the
internal storage structure of the document, which is what usually corrupts.
Do this for each problem document.
It is important to replace the Normal template first, because that's where I
think the corruption is, and it will be copied to each new blank document
you create in that case.
If you have other templates you think may have the problem, you need to
treat them the same way: copy all but the last paragraph mark into a new
blank document (but this time, save as a template).
If this DOESN'T fix the problem, we have to look further.
Next thing to do is to update your antivirus scanner and run a full system
scan. If there are any options to look inside compressed folders or
archives, turn them on. Let this run: it may take an hour
A common cause of this error is that a macro virus has got onto your system
and is trying to open a Windows PC memory location. Word on the Mac will
indeed interpret that as "Insufficient memory" because it has no "PC memory"
at all! The virus will fail, but it causes this irritation, and it can be
spread to your PC-using correspondents if you email them a document.
If the scan comes back clean, we then need to look for "Add-Ins" that may
cause this problem. On of the PDFMaker add-ins from Adobe PDF could, under
some circumstances, install PDFMaker.dot for the PC instead of the Mac
version. There could be others. Have you added or updated any software
recently?
Hope this helps
I'm sure this has been addressed before, but first time for me.
I have Microsoft Office 2004, which has been upgraded. I'm on a 250GB G5
iMac with 1GB memory. Lately, I have been getting a message of insufficient
memory and to save now while working on a document. When I click ok, Word
quits and the document is lost. Some of the documents are large, and some are
very small (just 1 page); it doesn't seem to matter. The only other program I
might have open at the time is a browser, so there isn't an excessive amount
of memory being used.
On my old mac using system 9, I was able to increase memory allotments in my
applications; is there a way to do that in Panther? Or does the solution to
this problem lie elsewhere? Any help in this matter would be greatly
appreciated. Thanks.
--
Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.
John McGhie <
[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410
