Repeated Word crashes - on two machines

[Richard_BW]

Version: 2008 Operating System: Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) Processor: Intel This is driving me nuts.

I have a large document (20,000 words, most of it in a single table, with one section break, pretty standard formatting and fonts throughout). Trouble is, it seems to crash randomly - whether I work on my desktop or laptop machine.

I have tried:

1) MAGGY (twice); no joy; so then
2) delete Normal on both machines; no joy; so then
3) Deleting all prefs on both machines (including deleting all traces of Office X); no joy; so then
4) Halving the file size, *then* MAGGY again (this time with a totally new name, and without selecting the last paragraph mark) (did it twice); no joy; so then
5) Delete prefs on both machines AGAIN...

This worked for about 5 days. Now it's crashing again. Every 5 minutes or so. Sometimes it's after an auto-correct, sometimes, when I type, sometimes when I save, sometimes it's just for a laugh - i.e., when I'm doing absolutely nothing.

AFAICT it's just this one document. The document is all in Arial and Calibri, I haven't installed any other software.

I would assume the doc is corrupted - but after 4 MAGGY's????

The only thing I can think left to do is save it as a pure text file - then wade through 20,000 words reformatting everything... Or uninstall and reinstall Office. If I can avoid either of those, I'd be really pleased.

Any advice folks?

Thanks,

Richard

 

[Richard_BW]

Just tried another thing: sent it as an attachment to a Windows machine (XP + Word 2007), used "save as" on the Windows Machine, sent the resulting file back...

It still crashes.

Richard

 

[CyberTaz]

Hi Richard;

It sounds like you're right about the corruption, but Tables - especially
ones as large as what you described - and section breaks can be a source of
the corruption. A Maggie will not resolve it if that's the case.

Are you using Track Changes in the document? If so that could well be part
of the problem as well. Turn it off, accept/reject all changes.

There are additional suggestions here on dealing with corruption - try #1:

http://word.mvps.org/Mac/DocumentCorruption.html

HTH |:>)
Bob Jones
[MVP] Office:Mac

 

[Richard_BW]

Hi Bob -

Thanks. I'll try these and report back.

Track changes is off, but maybe the other ideas will help.

Watch this space - and thanks again.

Richard

 

[Richard_BW]

Sorry John - I promised I'd report back. The key thing was the table, I think. So I converted the table to paragraphs, saved to pure text, then maggied the doc. No problems since - just a tedious day reformatting.

Thanks very much for the advice.

Best wishes,

Richard