Word and Excel documents freak out

[Jeremy Fieldsend]

I have an Excel document with a dozen or so worksheets which are linked
to a Word document (a report containing links to figures in the
spreadsheet.) Whenever the Word document tries to update itself from
the Excel sheet, the spreadsheet file disappears and reappears behind
the Word document every second or so until eventually - after about a
minute or so it just "unexpectedly quits".

I've run Norton and restarted and made a 'Save as' copy of both
documents to no avail.

Help please?

(MS Office; Word X and Excel X Service Release 1; Mac OS 10.2.8 on G4
Powerbook)

 

[Dayo Mitchell]

Service release 1 sounds like you aren't updated, see here:

http://www.mcgimpsey.com/macoffice/office/vxversions.html

Then check for general troubleshooting tips for Word, and if you surf the
same site, you will find Excel and Office troubleshooting pages as well.
http://www.mcgimpsey.com/macoffice/word/troubleshooting.html

If you think the Word doc may be corrupt, try this first:
The first way to check for a corrupt document is to
copy the entire thing, *excluding* the last paragraph mark, into a new
document. That last paragraph mark holds a lot of information which can get
corrupted, and copying the text into a document with a fresh one keeps your
formatting, but can fix some glitches.

A paragraph mark is a gray ¶. Click on ¶ on the standard toolbar to show
nonprinting characters, including paragraph marks.

See this link for further info:

http://www.mvps.org/word/FAQs/AppErrors/CorruptDoc.htm

But I have no clue whether there's an equivalent for excel documents.

DM