Text keeps disappearing

[Raziel]

Greetings,

Well, I have an odd problem. Big chunks of text keeps disappearing, without
any apparent reason. When I save and reload, the text is back; I don't lose
anything, but it's quite annoying to keep re-opening the document when you're
in the middle of some important work.

As for my document, it consists of two parallel text-boxes that connect with
two similar text-boxes on the following page, and so on (I need to parallel
texts spanning over several pages). This was the easiest way I could think of
to have two different texts (in different languages, one being Arabic and the
other Danish) running parallel - consisting in many pages.

Now, the error I keep experiencing is that sometimes when I am writing (in
the text-box with the Danish text), suddenly the document seems to autosave
or something like that, and then just as suddenly (when I begin writing
again), big chunks of the Arabic text disappears.

My document is a Word 2007 document and I'm running Win XP Home SP2 on a
Toshiba Satellite A40-221, with a P4-M Processor and 1 GB RAM. I have support
for Arabic installed and can write Arabic without any problems.

I have never experienced the problem with any earlier version of Word and I
have used Word 2000, XP and 2003.

If you need to know anything else about my system please feel free to ask,
and otherwise any idea or tip to solve this problem would be highly
appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
Raziel

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Actually, a better way to keep two texts running in parallel over many
pages would probably be a two-column table, starting a new row when you
want paragraphs lined up, and starting a new table at section/chapter
breaks. You can set the table to be borderless.

Switching from text boxes to tables should solve your problem--Word is
having problems showing the text boxes, maybe because of a problem with
the graphics card? I've got no idea, but tables are easier for Word to
handle (and for you to handle, probably). In addition, Word might have a
limit on how many linked text boxes you can have--it does in earlier
versions but might not in Word 2007, not sure.

Someone else may be able to address making the text boxes behave, however.

 

[Raziel]

Hey Daiya,

First of all, thanks for taking the time to respond. I think it's safe to
say that you made my life a bit easier

It's funny actually. I used to live and work with tables (I'm an old
HTML-guy), and I used to use tables for all kinds of stuff, but I hadn't
thought of using a table in this context. As it turns out, your simple
suggestion is actually quite brilliant and is much easier to work with than
the solution that I had found (through the Office 2007 help site).

Anyway, thanks a lot! I really appreciate it.
Raziel

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Glad to help. I certainly got the table idea from someone else here.

Daiya