Just purchased office 2001, Word crashes on save

[Bob Harris]

Howdy,

Today I purchased Office:Mac 2001, so as to be able to work with documents
my profs produce. Installed it this evening, opened a document, made no
changes, then did save as. My machine crashed. Tried this three times,
with same results every time. MacsBug tells me the crash is in
wdCommandDispatch (or something like that-- didn't write it down).

I was able to create a (very simple) new document and save it without
crashing. However, when I tried to copy the contents of the offending
document and paste them into a new one, they also crashed on save.

The offending document is at

http://warta.bio.psu.edu/htt_doc/WebPage/html/Courses/BIOL497D_2004/slides/p
roblem_set2.doc

Is it possible that the offending document was created with a newer version
of Word, probably on a PC, and there's an incompatibility between documents
created by newer versions and the version I have?

I am running Mac OS 9.2.2 on a B&W G3 Mac.

Thanks for any help,
Bob H

 

[Philip Ronan]

Howdy,

Today I purchased Office:Mac 2001, so as to be able to work with documents
my profs produce. Installed it this evening, opened a document, made no
changes, then did save as. My machine crashed. Tried this three times,
with same results every time. MacsBug tells me the crash is in
wdCommandDispatch (or something like that-- didn't write it down).

I was able to create a (very simple) new document and save it without
crashing. However, when I tried to copy the contents of the offending
document and paste them into a new one, they also crashed on save.

The offending document is at

http://warta.bio.psu.edu/htt_doc/WebPage/html/Courses/BIOL497D_2004/slides/p
roblem_set2.doc

Is it possible that the offending document was created with a newer version
of Word, probably on a PC, and there's an incompatibility between documents
created by newer versions and the version I have?

I am running Mac OS 9.2.2 on a B&W G3 Mac.

I didn't have any problems (b&w G3 / 9.1 / Word 2001 Japanese)

Have you checked the memory allocated to Word? Perhaps it needs a bit more.

There may also be an update on Microsoft's website you need to install

HTH,

Phil

 

[Bob Harris]

I didn't have any problems (b&w G3 / 9.1 / Word 2001 Japanese)

Just for clarification, did you try the document that I posted? For all I
know, it's the document that's causing the problem.

Have you checked the memory allocated to Word? Perhaps it needs a bit more.

It says it has 7M minimum, 10M preferred. It says it might need another 7M
if virtual memory is off, but virtual memory is on. And since a couple
times I was running this immediately after a reboot, I have to assume that
it was getting the full 10M it wants.

The document *seems* small, only requiring about 60K on disk.

There may also be an update on Microsoft's website you need to install

I did look for that, to see if any existed. I had trouble locating anything
that I could specifically identify as the latest update for office:mac 2001.
Can anyone here give me tips or point me to the right place to find that
information?

Thanks,
Bob H

 

[Dayo Mitchell]

Hi Bob,
There's no inherent incompatibility.

There is a Combined Updater which takes Office to Office 2001 SR 1, or
version 9.0.4. Click About...to see if you already have it. If not,
download it from http://www.microsoft.com/mac/download/default.asp.

Since the problem seems to be specific to one document, it may be corrupt.
The first way to check for a corrupt document is to
copy the entire thing, *excluding* the last paragraph mark, into a new
document. That last paragraph mark (click on ¶ to show marks) holds a lot of
information which can get corrupted, and copying the text into a document
with a fresh one keeps your formatting, but can fix some glitches.

See this link for further info:

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

Dayo

 

[Bob Harris]

There is a Combined Updater which takes Office to Office 2001 SR 1, or
version 9.0.4. Click About...to see if you already have it. If not,
download it from http://www.microsoft.com/mac/download/default.asp.

The about box doesn't show any version number. The top of the box is a
picture that looks like this (view in a monospace font):

+-----------------------+
| Word:mac |
| 2001 |
+-----------------------+

The top line of text below that simply says

Microsft(R) Word 2001

then it lists various copyrights.

How can I tell from that what version I have? Am I supposed to look
somewhere else for the version number?

Since the problem seems to be specific to one document, it may be corrupt.

That's just a guess on my part. The only other thing I have tried so far is
to create a fresh document, type in one word, and save it. That works (at
least it doesn't crash my machine). I haven't had time to try anything else
yet because every time I try something with this one document it crashes and
that takes up a bunch of time to recover from.

The only other word docs I have lying around are from the last version of
Word that I purchased, back in 1993. So I can try some of them.

The first way to check for a corrupt document is to copy the entire thing,
*excluding* the last paragraph mark, into a new document. That last paragraph
mark (click on ¶ to show marks) holds a lot of information which can get
corrupted, and copying the text into a document with a fresh one keeps your
formatting, but can fix some glitches.

Thanks. I have just tried that. I did a copy-paste of all but the final
paragraph. I'm not sure how to copy the final paragraph *without* copying
it's marker (markers are stored following the paragraph, right?), so I left
the whole paragraph out. Didn't matter. The result, when I tried to save
the new document, was the same-- machine crash.

Macsbug has this to say about the crash:

PowerPC read-only memory exception at wdCommandDispatch+948A8

The instruction at that location is

sthbrx r0,r6,r3

r0 = 00002049
r6 = 00000000
r3 = 0746D000

I can't find a description of what that instruction is supposed to do. Is
this G3 code or 68K code? It does seem like Word is trying to write to a
protected memory location.

See this link for further info:

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

All in all that's a pretty scary page. I'm going to try the
save-as-web-page method of document recovery.

Thanks for your help,
Bob H

 

[Bob Harris]

All in all that's a pretty scary page. I'm going to try the
save-as-web-page method of document recovery.

The save-as-web-page method worked. I saved the offending document as a web
page, quit word, opened the html document, then saved it as a word doc. No
crash. Quit word, launched that new doc, saved it as another doc. Again no
crash. And it appears all the content is there, tables and all.

Whoopee!

That's just a guess on my part.

It's still a guess. But at least if I have additional corrupt documents,
I'll know how to fix them.

The about box doesn't show any version number. ... How can I tell from that
what version I have? Am I supposed to look somewhere else for the version
number?

I'd still like to know whether I need the update or not. How can I tell?

Thanks again for your help,
Bob H

 

[Dayo Mitchell]

Hi Bob,

Glad you fixed your document. You do need the updater--underneath the image
in the About box, the first line of text should read:
Microsoft® Word 2001 Service Release 1 (when the updater has been installed)

FYI, in order to copy without the paragraph marker, you need to click ¶ on
the standard toolbar in order to see the nonprinting characters, aka
formatting marks. Then you can select text without the ¶ mark.

Dayo

 

[Steven P. Driska]

The save-as-web-page method worked. I saved the offending document as a web
page, quit word, opened the html document, then saved it as a word doc. No
crash. Quit word, launched that new doc, saved it as another doc. Again no
crash. And it appears all the content is there, tables and all.

Whoopee!


It's still a guess. But at least if I have additional corrupt documents,
I'll know how to fix them.


I'd still like to know whether I need the update or not. How can I tell?

Thanks again for your help,
Bob H

Locate the application on the hard drive, select it and chose Get Info
from the file menu. The window will show wtherter its SR-1 or not at
the top. Also the version will be listed. The current download updater
gives you version 9.0.4. I think the SR-1 has a version number of 9.0.1.

While you are there in this window you can select memory and you can
change the memory allocation, as someone else suggested.

-Steve

 

[Bob Harris]

Thanks, Dayo, Steven, and Philip.

 

[Beth Rosengard]

Locate the application on the hard drive, select it and chose Get Info
from the file menu. The window will show wtherter its SR-1 or not at
the top. Also the version will be listed. The current download updater
gives you version 9.0.4. I think the SR-1 has a version number of 9.0.1.

While you are there in this window you can select memory and you can
change the memory allocation, as someone else suggested.

-Steve

Steve is correct. The only Office (v.X and under) application that will
give you the correct and complete version and build number using "About..."
is Entourage (dumb as that is). For the others, use Get Info.

A couple of other points relevant to this thread: The size of a document
may be of far less significance than the complexity of it. In this case,
Bob, I'd be willing to bet that it was one (or more) of the tables that was
corrupt. Tables and graphics can make documents more corruption-prone as
well as more memory-hungry.

Also, on the question of memory: If you plan to use Word 2001 for complex
and/or large documents, then you might want to just go ahead and raise the
memory now, before you start getting system errors (Type 1-3 errors are
system errors). Here's the procedure:

Navigate to the Word application in the Finder, select it and Get Info
(Command i). Go to the Memory pane and raise Word's Preferred memory to
48000K (leave Minimum memory alone). Also, be sure Virtual Memory is turned
on (Control Panels> Memory).

Assigning that much Preferred memory does not mean that less memory is
available for other applications. If you assign Word 48000 K but are only
using 20000K at the moment, the other 28000K is available on demand by other
applications. This is *not* true of Minimum memory, which is one reason why
you always want to leave it at the default setting unless otherwise
instructed by the software manufacturer.

P.S. These memory issues don't exist in OS X which uses an entirely
different method of allocating memory.

Hope this helps.

--
Beth Rosengard
Mac MVP

Mac Word FAQ: <http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/WordMac/index.htm>
Entourage Help Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org/toc.html>

 

[Bob Harris]

Locate the application on the hard drive, select it and chose Get Info
from the file menu. The window will show wtherter its SR-1 or not at
the top. Also the version will be listed. The current download updater
gives you version 9.0.4. I think the SR-1 has a version number of 9.0.1.

I have now installed that. It fixes the problem as well.

Thanks,
Bob H