Word 2007 - Unable to read the document - Corrupt?

[Scottycat]

I open a Word 2002 document in Word 2007 with the intention of doing a 'Save
as' and then working on the newly saved document with information pertaining
to the person intended to receive the information. This type of task is for
itineraries and not suitable for mail merge. I do this maybe 3 times a week.

Lately I have been getting the error message 'Unable to read the document.
It may be corrupt. Try the following....'
This has caused loss of data and obviously time re-doing the whole document.

I discovered that if I follow the steps below I will corrupt the document
50% of the time.
* Open donor document.
* Save As
* Copy a table from either Excel or the web(using IE7 - Does not happen with
FireFox)
* Paste into the the newly saved document
* Keep on working in the document
* Save new document and close.
Opening the new document will have the error message.

If I change the sequence to:-
* Open donor document.
* Save As
* Close the new document.
* Open then new document.
* Then work on the document with cut and paste tables etc
* Save then close
Opening will be fine.

This is both a question to get more people to help with discovering why and
under what circumstances this happens and is also a workaround for other
people in this circumstance.

Questions are:
Why with tables?
Why with Word 2002 formated documents? These documents have Artwork borders,
pictures cut from the web and different fonts (Publisher would be more
suitable but who has the $ for 11 copies when you are a charity organisation?)
Why only 50% of the time?
Why does it fail with IE7 as a browser for a table copy but not FireFox?
Is there something in Word 2007 registry/options that closes neatly when you
close the document, but does not if you just do a save without closing?

Love to hear from MS on this one. I would love to hear from any one!

 

[Beth Melton]

Well, I doubt you'll be hearing from Microsoft on this, they don't hang out
in the newsgroups.

Is this the document you start with the same each time? If so, then can you
reproduce this error on other documents? If not, then it sounds as though
some corruption lies in the donor document you are using to start the
others - it's just not showing up until later. (Is there are reason your
donor document isn't a template so new files can be based on the template
instead of the need to use Save As?)

See if this improves the situation, in the Open dialog box, select your
donor document, click the arrow next to Open and then click Open and Repair.

Is there a reason these are stored in the old file format? There are many
factors in document corruption when working with the old binary file types,
tables are an element that are known to have instabilities. The version of
Word used to create the file doesn't really matter, Word 97-2003 uses the
same binary file format.

The new XML format is much more stable and an added bonus is the file sizes
are smaller. If a document saved in the Word 2007 format contains corruption
then Word will be able to recover document excluding the corruption. That
means less work in document recovery.

If the previous suggestion doesn't work, to use the Open and Repair option,
then I would convert the file to the new format by clicking the Microsoft
Office Button and then clicking Convert. If you need to retain the Word
97-2003 file format, after it's converted and saved, then save it as the
Word 97-2003 format.

I know this doesn't answer your questions about why tables and why Excel or
IE7 but unless something such as this can be reproduced on any document then
more often than not no one really knows why.

Please post all follow-up questions to the newsgroup. Requests for
assistance by email cannot be acknowledged.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Beth Melton
Microsoft Office MVP

Coauthor of Word 2007 Inside Out:
http://www.microsoft.com/MSPress/books/9801.aspx#AboutTheBook

Word FAQ: http://mvps.org/word
TechTrax eZine: http://mousetrax.com/techtrax/
MVP FAQ site: http://mvps.org/

 

[Scottycat]

Thanks Beth, but no Cigar.

To answer some of your questions/responses.

It is not the same donor document opened each time. I thought it might be
this and tried many others and then tried to analyse why some would fail but
others wouldn't. There was no discernable pattern except that the consistent
failures had artistic borders and cut and pastes from the web. Plain text
with headers & footers seemed to be OK but then as a 1st, 2nd & 3rd level
support I do not have the time to investigate every document.

The repair option was the first port of call. In its own style the MS
message basically said 'go forth and multiply with this document'.

Why are they stored in the old format? Well we upgraded to 2007 about 1
month ago (thanks to MS giving us donor copies through their charity arm) so
all our documents are in the old format. Staff know that docx is better,
however most of these itineries go to people who would not have upgraded,
hence when you do a 'save as' it saves it in the format of the 'donor'
document.

Why isn't the document opened from a 'Template'? There are many reasons why
not. Mostly that no itineries are the same. Some run to two pages some to 7
or 8 with differing info, so a document close to what will happen now is
used. If a template was used you would get a border, welcome message and some
contact details the same. Every thing else would have to be cut and pasted
from other documents taking more time. This not to say that 25+ templates
could not be created.

Thanks for you input.
As there is a workaround I am not loosing too much sleep on this - it is
just annoying and anything to help others in the same place as I was is worth
it.

Cheers,
Scottycat

 

[Bob I]

Don't know if it will help but there is an update that's supposed to fix
conversion issues.

Description of the update for Word 2007: May 8, 2007
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/934173

 

[Scottycat]

Thanks Bob I.
I downloaded as my search on the PC turned up an older version, but when I
went to run the later version, the installer told me that I had already
loaded it. Strange.
Thanks any way.