Large Word Documents

[Jamie Vail]

I have a couple of Word documents that are about 100-150 pages of just text.
At least once a week I get the error message saying, ³Word cannot write to
the work file² and I end up losing the changes I have made (I have to copy
and paste into new document). What is causing this to happen, and how can I
prevent this in the future?

Thanks

 

[CyberTaz]

Hi Jamie -

Where is the file stored? If other than on your Hard Drive, that could be
the problem.

Which version of Word, OS & any other details would be helpful.

Regards |:>)

 

[Jamie Vail]

The computer is an iBook with 1.33 GHz G4, 1.25 GB of Ram, file is stored to
the internal HD (40 GB free space). Mac OS 10.4.3, Office 2004 (latest
updates). No other apps, other than Safari are running while I am in Word.

Thanks again for the help

 

[CyberTaz]

The first thing I would suggest is that you use Disk Utility to Repair
Disk Permissions & see if that has any effect.

I have not seen anything related to that message, but apparently Word
is having difficulty creating/maintaining the necessary working files
while the doc is open. That's why I asked about where the file is
stored, as similar situations occur if trying to save directly to
floppies, small Zip disks or other restricted space.

This could also be a harbinger of potential problems with your hard
drive... not to alarm you, but as a matter of good practice, if you
have not backed it up recently it would be a good idea to do so. Might
not be necessary, but it can't hurt.

If repairing permissions doesn't help, boot from the OS X installation
CD or other bootable drive & run the Disk Utility Repair Disk on your
primary drive.

Post back with results & perhaps other suggestions will come along in
the mean time.

Good Luck |:>)

 

[Steve Hodgson]

I have a couple of Word documents that are about 100-150 pages of just text.
At least once a week I get the error message saying, ³Word cannot write to
the work file² and I end up losing the changes I have made (I have to copy
and paste into new document). What is causing this to happen, and how can I
prevent this in the future?

Does the message refer to the disk being full and suggest writing to another
location?

Cheers,

Steve

 

[Jamie Vail]

No, the disk has 40GB available, and it does not suggest writing to another
location. When I try to save again, I get the same error message, and
usually have to copy and paste into a new document. However, last night it
required a force quit to get out of word, and I lost what I was working on.
Could this be that an iBook G4 is not capable of handling 100-150 page Word
Documents?

Thanks for the help