Office 2004 & office V.x cannot open a Word 2003 (windows office) document

[Adam Lesser]

I've recently had the difficulty of not being able to sucessfully open
a Word 2003 document on Mac office , I tried with both the 2004 and
the V.x versions.

The document was done in Word 2003 on a windows machine and was 8
pages long, however, when opened in mac office, about 5 pages of the 8
displayed, with the rest being blank. Furthermore, Word believes
there to be thousands of pages in the document, I just watch as the
page count goes up and up and up, and it just doesnt stop. Currently
it's at 6354 pages and counting... (clearly this is some sort of bug).


Aside from some included graphics files (text-wrapped), the file is a
normal word file, nothing fancy or special.

Has anyone else had this experience ?
More importantly, does anyone have a hack-fix until MSFT finds this
bug ? (Is there somewhere where I should be formally reporting this
bug ?)

The document is non-confidential, and I'd be willing to email it to
anyone interested (but it's 4.5 MB because of the pictures).

Thanks very much for reading !

Adam Lesser

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

The page count going up to thousands actually suggests that the doc is
corrupted. There are suggestions for uncorrupting here (do on a copy):
http://word.mvps.org/MacWordNew/DocumentCorruption.htm
(hit refresh a few times in Safari, or use a different browser)

Documents can get corrupted when transferred by email, I believe--it's
safest to zip them first.

If you have access to the windows machine, you can also try uncorrupting it
there.
http://www.mvps.org/word/FAQs/AppErrors/CorruptDoc.htm
(hit refresh a few times in Safari, or use a different browser)

This problem is not likely to be a bug, but for future reference, you can
report things directly to the Mac arm of MS by using Send Feedback under
Help in any Office application, which takes you to this website:
http://www.microsoft.com/mac/feedback/suggestion.asp

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Adam:

Daiya is right: you have a corrupt document there. Chances are, if you sent
it back to the PC, it would display the same symptoms or (more likely)
refuse to open at all. Word 2004 is a little more capable at opening these
than Word 2003 is.

To fix it, open the document and switch to "Normal" View. That will stop
the "paginating forever".

Then copy all EXCEPT the very last paragraph mark, and paste into a fresh
new document.

That should fix the document.

It's not a bug: although it can be the side-effect of a bug. Usually, it's
the result of sloppy editing with Track Changes left on. It can also be
caused by intemperate changes to the bullets and numbering. The document's
internal structure has been damaged.

Hope this helps

I've recently had the difficulty of not being able to sucessfully open
a Word 2003 document on Mac office , I tried with both the 2004 and
the V.x versions.

The document was done in Word 2003 on a windows machine and was 8
pages long, however, when opened in mac office, about 5 pages of the 8
displayed, with the rest being blank. Furthermore, Word believes
there to be thousands of pages in the document, I just watch as the
page count goes up and up and up, and it just doesnt stop. Currently
it's at 6354 pages and counting... (clearly this is some sort of bug).


Aside from some included graphics files (text-wrapped), the file is a
normal word file, nothing fancy or special.

Has anyone else had this experience ?
More importantly, does anyone have a hack-fix until MSFT finds this
bug ? (Is there somewhere where I should be formally reporting this
bug ?)

The document is non-confidential, and I'd be willing to email it to
anyone interested (but it's 4.5 MB because of the pictures).

Thanks very much for reading !

Adam Lesser

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410