Word Mac 2004 Major Flaw?

[hibitdat]

Help!

We support a large number of Schools in our county (UK) and an
increasing number of them use Office 04 on the Mac. We are getting
almost daily complaints of Word literally loosing work, especially on
largish documents.

An example is a students project write-up. They work on the document as
needed, auto-save and backup are enabled and they save regularly. They
then close the document and Word, go and do something else on the Mac
(check emails, wacth a DVD etc) and then re-open Word and the document,
only to discover that some or all of the most recent changes are gone!

I have now had this happen myself on a few occasions using a Powerbook
that has a clean install of Tiger and Office 04 with all the updates to
both applied and nothing else - therefore we are rapidly reaching the
conclusion that Word 2004 for the Mac is fundamentally flawed and too
risky to recommend. Some customers have requested that we look into
viable open source alternatives.

Has anyone else seen this problem and better yet got a solution? I hope
Microsoft can fix this, and quick, before all confidence in the product
is lost.

 

[mournac]

I just had that problem happen now.
I was working on a document of about 10 pages, with lots of formatted
text boxes, and everything was working fine until for some reason all
the text was gone (except one tiny text box).
At the time, I was extracting text with an appication called Wordfast.
It's a tool for translators that (among other things) segments two
texts so they can be aligned and a memory created. It's basically a
huge macro. It works fine and is not known to create that kind of
problem.
But in any case, that's what I was doing at the time.
Then I decided to check the original file, and that's when I found out
it had been erased (along with its backup copies and the one I had
saved on an external drive).

Since that file had been sent to me with a bunch of others in a zipped
folder, I went back to the zipped folder, decompressed it and got the
file in question, and guess what? It was empty as well!
How could that be possible at all???

I must say that I have run into that kind of problem in the past (going
back several versions of Word) and never found an answer. Fortunately,
that is a very rare occurence for me, but it can wreak havoc on a day's
work.

I'm using Word 2004 with all patches installed, under OS 10.4.3.

Any clues would be greatly appreciated.

René

 

[mournac]

I am fully aware of how ridiculous it sounds, but it's all too real.

However, after trying all kinds of things I have discovered that if I
create a new user and open the file from that account, then the file
looks fine.

This suggests that it is not really erased (although a word count finds
nothing), and that something else is messing with it.

So it would appear that it's not a Word problem, although it's the
only app that has ever displayed this type of behavior.

What is however a Word issue is that although the file now looks fine
in the new user account, it has also become "read only".
Since I need to work on it, this is a problem.
How do I correct that?

René

 

[hibitdat]

Hi CyberTaz, sorry to contradict you but Word 2004 Mac most certainly
DOES have Auto Save! I am looking at the option in prefs as I type -
you can enable or disable it, and specify at what time interval the
saves take place...

 

[hibitdat]

Right, as requested I will clarify a few points...

1) This is occurring with increaing regularity on a number of different
(different sites entirely) Macs. All the Mac's I have visited
(including the one here with the problem) have been running 10.4.3
(though we had reports of this problem even before Tiger - only now
have we started to investigate because of the increasing frequency of
complaints) and they are all bang up to date according to the built-in
office update.

2) None of the Macs with the problem are networked or trying to save to
a server, indeed on the Powerbook here the files are saved locally - no
memory sticks or external drives!

3) The files have ranged from a couple of pages to between 150-200 -
there seems to be no discrimination.

4) I suspect that it is slightly more common when working with .dot
templates but I can't prove this. It seems to occur on both new locally
created docs and docs emailed, burnt, transfered by stick etc...

5) All the usual Mac maintenance tricks (permisions, safe start etc
etc) have been tried to no avail.

6) Creating new accounts makes no difference, even reformatting with
Tiger and reinstalling anew fails to prevent this major problem.

Hope this helps.

 

[JE McGimpsey]

1) This is occurring with increaing regularity on a number of different
(different sites entirely) Macs. All the Mac's I have visited
(including the one here with the problem) have been running 10.4.3
(though we had reports of this problem even before Tiger - only now
have we started to investigate because of the increasing frequency of
complaints) and they are all bang up to date according to the built-in
office update.

2) None of the Macs with the problem are networked or trying to save to
a server, indeed on the Powerbook here the files are saved locally - no
memory sticks or external drives!

If you have Create Backup enabled, is the backup being created? Open a
new file and save it. Does it appear in the appropriate folder in
Finder? Make a change, save it again. Did the file's modified date
update? Does a backup now exist with the previous modified date?

Close Word. Are both the original and backup files still there?

6) Creating new accounts makes no difference, even reformatting with
Tiger and reinstalling anew fails to prevent this major problem.

Do you have any files in the

HD:Applications:Microsoft Office 2004:Office:Startup:Word

folder (i.e., add-ins, or global templates)?

 

[Elliott Roper]

Right, as requested I will clarify a few points...

1) This is occurring with increaing regularity on a number of different
(different sites entirely) Macs. All the Mac's I have visited
(including the one here with the problem) have been running 10.4.3
(though we had reports of this problem even before Tiger - only now
have we started to investigate because of the increasing frequency of
complaints) and they are all bang up to date according to the built-in
office update.

2) None of the Macs with the problem are networked or trying to save to
a server, indeed on the Powerbook here the files are saved locally - no
memory sticks or external drives!

3) The files have ranged from a couple of pages to between 150-200 -
there seems to be no discrimination.

4) I suspect that it is slightly more common when working with .dot
templates but I can't prove this. It seems to occur on both new locally
created docs and docs emailed, burnt, transfered by stick etc...

5) All the usual Mac maintenance tricks (permisions, safe start etc
etc) have been tried to no avail.

6) Creating new accounts makes no difference, even reformatting with
Tiger and reinstalling anew fails to prevent this major problem.

Hope this helps.

What you are seeing is utterly unheard of. There must be something
wrong that you have not yet described.

My copy of word has no Autosave preference, just like Cybertaz's
All it has is a checkbox "Save Autorecover info every ( ) minutes.
It is not clear that you understand what it does. All it does is
squirrel away a copy of the current document in case Word crashes.
Hover the mouse over the checkbox and carefully read the "Description
of Preference".
If you quit Word or close a document without explicitly saving it, the
autosave copy is deleted too. After all, you have just told Word you
don't want to keep your work.

If *all* your users are properly saving their work, completely ignoring
the checked-ness or otherwise of the "autosave" we have to look
elsewhere for an explanation.

You might describe in what way the documents are "loosed".
Is the document completley missing? Is it simply missing today's
changes?
Can you see the file in the finder? Does Get Info on the file have the
expected date and time?
Do the files disappear immediately, or are they missing next day?

Do you have some school-wide backup / file synch regime? If so,
describe the product and procedure used to run it.

Do you ever see this problem on a lappy not connected to the network.
i.e. can you always make a good copy to a stick before reconnecting the
little sniveller to the network.

Is there a particularly nerdish evil genius in the lower sixth?
Who knows the administrator password on each machine?

You might get the idea that I (and I am famous for giving Word a hard
time) think your problem lies outside Word, and in something common to
your school environment that is uncommon elsewhere.

There is one tiny possibility that the problem lies with Word. Your
sites may be incubating a new macro virus that mis-saves documents.
Do you have a common template with macros enabled?
Do you have a common global template?
Do all your users have the macro warning preference checked? Do they
all refuse to enable the macros?

Google this group for macro virus. We had an interesting discussion
here about what was possible, even on a Mac.

If you can definitely eliminate a feral backup/synchronising regime,
and isolate that little toad in the lower sixth, then you need to get
an Office VBA expert to examine your environment.

 

[CyberTaz]

Hi CyberTaz, sorry to contradict you

Please understand that I have _no_ qualms about being contradicted...
otherwise I would still be lumbering along at the same level of
stupidity I had attained at an earlier age when I, too, thought I new
everything. All I ask is that if you do choose to contradict me that
you be _right_ in what you say... or at least 'righter' than I.

but Word 2004 Mac most certainly DOES have Auto Save!

See what I mean, NO it does _not_.

I am looking at the option in prefs as I type -
you can enable or disable it, and specify at what time interval the
saves take place...

Perhaps you are "looking" at it, but you seem to be seeing what you
want to see rather than _reading_ what is actually there.

All this as it may be, my purpose is _not_ to get into a p*ss*ng
contest with you or anyone else, so I will graciously bow out of the
thread & leave it to those whose replies may have more positve
reception.

Regards |:>)

 

[Fred Evans]

I have Word 2004 also and I have Auto Recover but not auto Save. The
instructions say that Word will create an auto RECOVER document every X
minutes in case of power failure or whatever but they further say you must
SAVE your document when you are finished. Doesn't sound like Auto Save to
me.

Regards,

Fred Evans
Powerbook G4 1.67 GHZ, 15", 1GB RAM, 10.3.9

 

[Aaron Shepard]

However, after trying all kinds of things I have discovered that if I
create a new user and open the file from that account, then the file
looks fine.

It sounds like you have a damaged preference file. With Word closed, go
to your user folder, then Library, then Preferences, and remove
com.microsoft.Word.plist.

Aaron

 

[JE McGimpsey]

That's not the correct path to Word 2004's prefs, Aaron, nor the correct
name of the file. Here it is:

Home/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/com.microsoft.Word.prefs.plist

Well, to be fair, the file that Aaron cited is *a* Word preference file,
but it's the one the system generates and contains only such things as
information about window placement. Beth's right, of course, that the
one inside the

~:Libraryreference:Microsoft:

folder is the one to kill.

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

Sorry: CyberTaz is correct, and the Prefs is mis-labelled. It should read
"Automatically save recovery information".

What it saves is the "changes" between the document on disk and the document
on screen. Regrettably, unless Word knows that it has crashed, the saved
information is never recovered.

Worse: If Word cannot read the original document, there is nothing to which
it "can" apply the saved information, so the changes cannot be applied.


It is NOT an auto-save. We have been asking Microsoft for an Auto SAVE for
years: they won't listen!

Cheers

Hi CyberTaz, sorry to contradict you but Word 2004 Mac most certainly
DOES have Auto Save! I am looking at the option in prefs as I type -
you can enable or disable it, and specify at what time interval the
saves take place...

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

Let me take a wild guess here

You're on a Student machine? Check the Normal template for an AutoOpen
macro that turns the font of the Normal style WHITE It's a very old
prank...

Every document you open will instantly appear to have no text in it

If you do not know how to check the normal template for macros, simply
re-name it to something other than Normal.

Chances are that will fix your problem!

Cheers

I am fully aware of how ridiculous it sounds, but it's all too real.

However, after trying all kinds of things I have discovered that if I
create a new user and open the file from that account, then the file
looks fine.

This suggests that it is not really erased (although a word count finds
nothing), and that something else is messing with it.

So it would appear that it's not a Word problem, although it's the
only app that has ever displayed this type of behavior.

What is however a Word issue is that although the file now looks fine
in the new user account, it has also become "read only".
Since I need to work on it, this is a problem.
How do I correct that?

René

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

 

[CyberTaz]

Hi John -

Sorry: CyberTaz is correct, and the Prefs is mis-labelled. It should read
"Automatically save recovery information".

Thanks for the support 8)

We have been asking Microsoft for an Auto SAVE for
years: they won't listen!

Actually, did they _not_ include it in PC Word (2000, maybe)? I know PC
Excel did, but it has since been removed.

The unfortunate thing is that a feature like that simply becomes
another source of confusion for many... Do I/Do I Not have it on, It
overwrote a file I didn't want to overwrite, It didn't save when I
expected it to, etc.

Quite frankly, I'm not in favor of AutoSave & would simply leave it OFF
if they do add it. Old School Hard*ss, here... I still believe users
should be responsible for saving their own work appropriately. Then,
again, I would like to see automtic transmissions go away, too -
perhaps it would get at least a few incompetent drivers off the roads
8)

Regards |:>)

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

Hi CyberTaz:

No: Word 2 on the PC had an AutoSave. They took it OUT in Word 6 and they
won't put it back

I will join your campaign to force all users to do everything they *should*
do right after YOU start driving at or below the speed limit. All of the
time. No exceptions

Cheers

Hi John -


Thanks for the support 8)


Actually, did they _not_ include it in PC Word (2000, maybe)? I know PC
Excel did, but it has since been removed.

The unfortunate thing is that a feature like that simply becomes
another source of confusion for many... Do I/Do I Not have it on, It
overwrote a file I didn't want to overwrite, It didn't save when I
expected it to, etc.

Quite frankly, I'm not in favor of AutoSave & would simply leave it OFF
if they do add it. Old School Hard*ss, here... I still believe users
should be responsible for saving their own work appropriately. Then,
again, I would like to see automtic transmissions go away, too -
perhaps it would get at least a few incompetent drivers off the roads
8)

Regards |:>)

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

 

[CyberTaz]

I will join your campaign to force all users to do everything they *should*
do right after YOU start driving at or below the speed limit. All of the
time. No exceptions

I was told you were omniscient, but _this_ is impressively ridiculous!

Regards |:>)