Too many changes

[Karen]

I have been developing and editing an 800-900 page
document (medical handbook) for almost an entire year. I
am in the final editing stages and am attempting to
generate the "Table of Contents". Word will not allow me
to create the TOC and gives me an error message. I
believe that over the last year, I have made so many
changes to the document, and Word has kept track of all
those changes, that it is out of memory. (Each day, I get
many messages telling me that I will not be able to undo a
change because there is not any memory left. My
question: Is there a way to clear the Word memory of all
previous changes? I do have the track changes turned off,
but it was on for most of the year. It is almost
impossible to do any editing. Any and all suggestions
will be appreciated.

 

[Margaret Aldis]

Hi Karen

Remove tracked changes by 'accepting changes'. Take a copy of your document
first. (If you are working on a large document like this, you should be
keeping regular copies anyway, just in case you have a major problem and
have to back track.)

 

[jesse]

Karen,

There may be a problem with document corruption.
Unfortunately there is no simple method of determining
whether that's the case, but here is one method that might
work...


1. With you current document open, start a new document in
Word.

2. Begin copying sections (say, 20 pages at time) of the
original document.

3. Paste the copied sections of the large document, 20
pages at a time, into the new document.

4. Attempt to generate your table of contents after
pasting each 20 page selection.

5. At some point you may, or may not find that the TOC
fails to generate. If this occurs, you've located the
section containing the problem. You can further narrow
down the problem area by copying one page at a time in
that group.

I have used this method to successfully rescue rather
large projects in the past that developed corruption
problems.

Good luck
jesse

 

[Margie]

I had the exact same error message yesterday with a
relatively small document of 58 pages and was rattled
when the message came up and I really didn't want to
start over on this document.

I selected all,
right-clicked,
clicked UPDATE FIELD .
to the prompt for the TOC, I selected Update Entire Table
.. did same for Table of Figures .
and viola, it solved my problem.
(It updated both my TOC and TOF ... and also updated
changes to additional graphics.)

Don't know if it will work on long documents, or whether
I just got lucky. But I haven't had any problems
since ...