MS Word 2004 track changes problem: growing files

[emmygold]

Hi. I'm an editor who uses track changes to communicate with my
clients. Using MS Word 2004 for the Mac, I've edited several chapters
of a client's dissertation with no problem. However, with this last
chapter, weird and disturbing things happen when I correct more than a
page or two.

I kept trying to use track changes on different copies of the file. The
first bunch of attempts, the twirly wheel appeared and the computer
crashed. Lately, though the computer doesn't crash, one of her
footnotes, in garbled form, replaces the header, and the file grows
massively -- like from 45 pages to 195 pages. It ends up containing
scrambled fragments of the chapter, sometimes in weird decreasing form
like the following:

nclusive, right?
lusive, right?
sive, right?
ve, right?
, right?
right?
ght?
t?

The footnote which ended up in the header was one she had added at the
last minute, in red. I changed it from red to black, and things
improved -- I was able to do track changes on several pages of the file
-- but then the same thing happened, with another footnote appearing in
the header.

I can't quit using Track Changes because it's my livelihood, and her
other files were fine. I can get another copy of her file, but I'm
afraid it'll have the same problem.

I'd appreciate any suggestions about what may be going on, and more
important, what to do about it.

Thanks a million!

Emmy

P.S. please answer to the newsgroup rather than by email.
P.P.S. Just for the record, "fast save" is already turned off.

 

[little_creature]

Hello,
track changes and footnotes are very prone to cause document corruption.
If you need preserve track changes, try to search all your footnotes
first. Usually some invisible character (like end of paragraph) is
responsible for big problems.
You might try this as well:
http://word.mvps.org/Mac/DocumentCorruption.html

emmygold said the following on 2.12.2006 7:10: