Recurrent crashing Word vX

[pav]

I am running Word X v 10.1.6 with OSX 3.2
I have a recurring problem with documents of some 6000 words causing
Word to crash. The document is always one single paragraph with no
breaks of any kind.
This only occurs once the document reaches this size, wether it is
autosaved every 1 or 10 minutes makes no difference. New short
documents cause no problem.
Previously i solved this problem by following the techniques for fixing
individual corrupted documents.
This time round none of the troubleshooting suggestions work. I have
checked all my microsoft
preferences & settings for corruption and tested my Normal template. I
have no plug ins for Word.

I would be grateful of any suggestions the group may have.

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Do you type this document, or is it generated by something else?

Which corruption fixes did you try on this particular document, and which
ones usually worked before?

And there is no such thing as AutoSave, by the way--it's only AutoRecover,
and only kicks in if Word crashes.

 

[CyberTaz]

Hello-

Have not worked with that type/size of doc before, but here are a few
thoughts to consider:

Generally, if a file is "corrupted" you can't open it in the first
place or the app locks up as soon as you try. It sounds like other
issues might be at work.

How much RAM does your system have? If you are continuously typing this
volume of content without saving as you go (or if it is being imported
from some source other than you typing it), it could be that a doc of
that size is locking up all of your memory, especially if other
programs are also active.

How much free disk space do you have? If you save many files of this
size they may be filling up the drive. That could also help explain the
problem. Docs of this size are probably about 300 pages(?) and if RAM
is low, room for caching is even more demanding than usual.

I've also heard that earlier versions of Word have had difficulty with
docs that run 300+ pages, but I don't know this to be true. What the
"capacity" of X or '04 is I'm not sure, but that could also be a
factor.

If everything above checks out okay, you might consider using
Master/Subdocuments to handle docs of that size. There may also be some
other options to explore. Since there is no problem otherwise, though,
it seems the large docs are the source of the problem.

Hope some of this is useful |:>)

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

This is a corrupt document. Word will go to about 5,500 "pages" before size
becomes a problem.

To fix this, save the document as a web page. Close it, open the HTML
version in Word, and re-save it as a document with a different file name.

That should fix it. Chances are, it's an unresolved tracked change that has
gone bad. Make sure Track Changes is OFF, not just hidden.

Cheers

I am running Word X v 10.1.6 with OSX 3.2
I have a recurring problem with documents of some 6000 words causing
Word to crash. The document is always one single paragraph with no
breaks of any kind.
This only occurs once the document reaches this size, wether it is
autosaved every 1 or 10 minutes makes no difference. New short
documents cause no problem.
Previously i solved this problem by following the techniques for fixing
individual corrupted documents.
This time round none of the troubleshooting suggestions work. I have
checked all my microsoft
preferences & settings for corruption and tested my Normal template. I
have no plug ins for Word.

I would be grateful of any suggestions the group may have.

--

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 4 1209 1410

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

This is a corrupt document. Word will go to about 5,500 "pages" before size
becomes a problem.

So John, does Word care if there are some 50 pages all in *one* paragraph?

DM

 

[jelosamkr]

Hi...
i once had to type a huge doc for my thesis...
i had a similar problem.. but i dont understand what the 'curruption'
really consist of...
is it a bad letter or language or bad encoding or what? what is a
"corruption" in concrete words?

i noticed that when i try to open a doc with korean characters it does not
open the file... But i could open them before the last update... once i
had the last update downloaded... i can no longer open the files i used to
open..
but when i try it on a friends Mac with japanese version of Word v.X i can
open it without problems.. so i tried saving it as a new doc file... then
try to open it on my Mac... but as my Word is English version.... it
wouldnt open the doc...
i use 10.2.8 Jaguar...
i am planning to get the new Office once Tiger ships...

 

[pav]

Do you type this document, or is it generated by something else?

I type this document. 6000 words is only a document of 9 pages !
a short document I define for my purposes as 1 page.

Which corruption fixes did you try on this particular document, and which
ones usually worked before?

On this particular document ALL the fixes recommended in the MVP
troubleshooting guide.
Previously when this occurred "copying all but the last paragraph mark"
to a new document worked.

 

[pav]

My document of 6000 words constitutes only 9 pages.
Re. track changes, my setting is :
in Tools / Track changes / Highlight changes - 'track changes while
editing' is unticked, while 'highlight changes on screen' and
'highlight changes in printed document' are both ticked.
Do these options make track changes off or hidden?

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Re. track changes, my setting is :

in Tools / Track changes / Highlight changes - 'track changes while
editing' is unticked, while 'highlight changes on screen' and
'highlight changes in printed document' are both ticked.
Do these options make track changes off or hidden?

Track Changes is off--with that first box unchecked. Have you been tracking
changes? If so, try Accepting all the changes. I can't tell you how b/c I
have a different version, but the relevant Help topic should be:
Review tracked changes and comments

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

Hi Daiya:

No. It doesn't. That probably makes things easier for Word, in that it has
only one set of pointers into the formatting tables to consider

The official "limit" is 32 MB of "text" in a single document. That's
5,333,333 "words". However, this total does not count graphics or
formatting or anything else. What it actually means is that Word keeps
track of text by measuring its "offset" from the top of the file, and the
furthest character it can see is 2 to the power 32 from the beginning
(32-bit memory addressing).

The number of "pages" is irrelevant: pages do not exist internally in the
file. They are inserted at output time, either on the way to the display or
on the way to the printer. When I tested it, using four-line paragraphs in
12 point type with 10 points leading, it came to about 5,500 A4 pages (maybe
6,000 Letter-sized pages).

However, I think the "limit" is a bit out-dated and operating system
dependant. I was testing on a 32-bit ("normal") version of Windows XP, and
I was able to comfortably exceed the 32 MB limit. Things got very slow, and
above 999 pages, Word's page counter runs out of room at the bottom of the
screen and displays a line of stars, but it kept going.

I have no reason to expect that MacOS X and HFS+ would have a lower limit.

My point in that post was simply that human beings run out of patience in a
document long before Word does. Most office workers would tell you that
their document is "large" when it hits around a hundred pages. Modern
versions of Word haven't even cracked a sweat by then

For practical purposes, the upper limit of document size is determined by
the file size on disk. Eventually, we get sick of waiting for the thing to
write back to disk on each save. For desktop workstations, that limit
arrives at around 32 MB of overall file size, including graphics and
formatting.

Faster workstations with faster disks will go higher: laptops tend to become
unwieldy at around 12 MB.

Cheers

So John, does Word care if there are some 50 pages all in *one* paragraph?

DM

--

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 4 1209 1410

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

It's an "unresolved" file pointer. Internally, a Word document is not a
stream of text, it's thousands of containers of text strings, each connected
by pointers that indicate how far from the front of the file the container
begins.

A "corruption" is where Word looks at the indicated location for an object,
only to find that it's no longer there.

The most common cause is the internal list structures (bullets or
numbering). The next most common cause is broken tables, and broken section
breaks. But unresolved tracked changes can do it, as can careless
formatting that corrupts the style table.

Almost anything else can cause it too: it's just that those are the most
common causes and the first thing we look for.

If you can get the document open at all, carefully copy all but the last
paragraph mark and paste into a new blank document. Save under a new file
name. That fixes almost all corruptions by forcing Word to rebuild the
internal structure of the document and fix the bad pointers.

Hope this helps

Hi...
i once had to type a huge doc for my thesis...
i had a similar problem.. but i dont understand what the 'curruption'
really consist of...
is it a bad letter or language or bad encoding or what? what is a
"corruption" in concrete words?

i noticed that when i try to open a doc with korean characters it does not
open the file... But i could open them before the last update... once i
had the last update downloaded... i can no longer open the files i used to
open..
but when i try it on a friends Mac with japanese version of Word v.X i can
open it without problems.. so i tried saving it as a new doc file... then
try to open it on my Mac... but as my Word is English version.... it
wouldnt open the doc...
i use 10.2.8 Jaguar...
i am planning to get the new Office once Tiger ships...

--

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 4 1209 1410

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Do you type this document, or is it generated by something else?

I type this document. 6000 words is only a document of 9 pages !
a short document I define for my purposes as 1 page.

Right, my math was off. I ought to know better. (offtopic, but why are you
typing 6000 words in one single paragraph? That's surely unreadable.)

On this particular document ALL the fixes recommended in the MVP
troubleshooting guide.

This one, that lists 4 techniques?
http://word.mvps.org/MacWordNew/DocumentCorruption.htm
(hit refresh a few times in Safari, or use a different browser)

Previously when this occurred "copying all but the last paragraph mark"
to a new document worked.

Do you have any tables in the doc? You tried the tedious binary search on
this doc and it still crashes?

Have these documents all been generated from the Normal template? It's
conceivable that there is corruption in the Normal template--I know you said
you tested it, but as the root of why the documents are crashing rather than
causing the program to crash right then. It might be worth switching to a
fresh one. And then trying fixes #2, #3, and #4 into a blank doc based on a
fresh Normal.

excuse my impreciseness

Just that I don't want you relying on something that doesn't exist, or
encouraging others to think it exists.

Not sure what else to suggest--Remove and Reinstall seems like overkill when
the problem seems linked to a specific doc--though I think I was mistaken
about that once before. There are also the disk maintenance suggestions in
the MVP troubleshooting guide, can't hurt to try those.
http://word.mvps.org/MacWordNew/TroubleshootingIndex.htm
(hit refresh a few times in Safari, or use a different browser)

If all else fails, since it is linked to the size, perhaps you can break it
into two and use it in two pieces?

DM