Word 2002 cannot edit Word 2000 document

[Seamus McMillan]

A colleague of mine using Word 2000 (SR-1) created a 120
page document which he passed to me for review and
changes. I am running Word 2002 (SP-2). What I
discovered, to our intense frustration, was that I could
edit parts of the document but attempting to edit certain
other portions resulted in Word refusing the input and
then crashing. By examining this issue on other
computers running Word 2000 and Word 2002 we were able to
verify that is a version incompatibility and something
that Microsoft damn well should have caught and fixed
before Word 2002 was ever released.

In the meantime I would be most grateful for any
suggestions as to how to enable Word 2002 to be able to
reliably open and edit Word 2000 files.

Thank you in advance

Seamus McMillan

 

[Robert M. Franz (RMF)]

Hi Seamus,

A colleague of mine using Word 2000 (SR-1) created a 120
page document which he passed to me for review and
changes. I am running Word 2002 (SP-2). What I
discovered, to our intense frustration, was that I could
edit parts of the document but attempting to edit certain
other portions resulted in Word refusing the input and
then crashing. By examining this issue on other
computers running Word 2000 and Word 2002 we were able to
verify that is a version incompatibility and something
that Microsoft damn well should have caught and fixed
before Word 2002 was ever released.

In the meantime I would be most grateful for any
suggestions as to how to enable Word 2002 to be able to
reliably open and edit Word 2000 files.

AFAICT, the Microsoft point-of-view is: the file format has not been
changed since Word 97 (aside from new features, documents should be
forward and backward compatible).

In your case, the document might as well be corrupt, might as well try:

How can I recover a corrupt document or template – and why did it become
corrupt? (by Dave Rado, with acknowledgements to John McGhie)
http://www.mvps.org/word/FAQs/AppErrors/CorruptDoc.htm

Greetinx
..bob
...Word-MVP