Word 2007 not responding when I use "find"

[Tracey Beth]

Suddenly Word 2007 stops responding when I control-F to find something in a
document.

It worked yesterday.

I downloaded the Service Pack and ran diagnostics and it still does it.

Any suggestions?

Thanks,
Tracey

 

[Terry Farrell]

Having hyphenations enabled causes this problem. It is a known bug that is
being looked into.

 

[Tracey Beth]

Thanks for your quick reply. I still have a problem, though.

I don't have hyphenation enabled as far as I know. I went through the help
topic and tried to double check, but when I get to the options menu and click

 

[Terry Farrell]

Rerun Office setup, advanced options and under proofing make sure all
components are installed except for hyphenation.

Terry

 

[Mike Blyth]

Rerun Office setup, advanced options and under proofing make sure all
components are installed except for hyphenation.

Terry

I am having the same problem. In the setup program, though, there is no
Advanced Options for Word. It is found under Office Shared Features --
Proofing Tools -- English Proofing Tools. However, removing the hyphenation
component did not fix the problem.

Word stops responding during the search (after I press Find Next). Some
words work fine, some words find the first occurrence and crash when looking
for the next, and some words cause the lockup immediately. Word CPU use goes
to 50%.

Any more ideas?

Thanks.

 

[Mike Blyth]

I discovered that the problem was a word with 3 consecutive optional hyphens.
Some testing shows that a the pattern digit---digit causes the crash, where
the hyphens are optional hyphens. Thus "9---5" causes a crash, while
"nine---five" does not. It must be very rare to have this pattern in a
document, since it basically would be an accident. Nonetheless, it rendered
the document unusable until the problem was isolated and removed.

 

[Anne Goldenberger]

Thanks for posting this Mike. Apparently it is not THAT rare because indeed
that was exactly what I found in my document. I removed them and Word
stopped crashing. What a relief to find an answer...

Anne Goldenberger

 

[Brad B.]

Did you ever find a solution to your problem? I have the same issue and have
done everything i.e. update, repair, reinstall, uninstall.....and was hopin
you had found a solution.

 

[Neil Cumfer]

Microsoft has released a hotfix (July 2008) that seems to handle various
situations in Word 2007
where the "find" feature causes Word to stop responding
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/955587/en-us?FR=1

It worked for me but I can't guarantee that it will work for everybody,
I would recommend that you try it though

 

[Kathleen Tacelosky]

I was having the same issue and it was digit hyphen digit (in my case 4-4) that was the problem. I just deleted that, and it's back to working just fine. There are other hyphens in the document, but it was something about the digits on either side of the hyphen. Kathleen