Word start-up

[Linda]

Why does a letter which I entered months ago, come up as
the new document every time I open WORD? How did that
happen and how can I get rid of it? Thanks!

 

[Jay Freedman]

Hi, Linda,

See http://www.mvps.org/word/FAQs/AppErrors/BlankDocNotBlank.htm

 

[Larry]

Jay,

Since thousands of users have this problem, I wondered how it could
happen. And I just don't see it. Even if I inadvertently change the
Save as Type window in the Save As dialog box to Document Template, the
name of that document is not going to be "Normal.dot" unless I
deliberately type that in. So I can't figure for the life of me how
this is such a common problem.

I looked up the MVP article on this, and it gives no explanation at all.
It just calls it a "mystery" and leaves it at that:

"It is a mystery how users manage to save text in Normal.dot, but if
your “blank” documents suddenly start opening with the text of an old
document in them, this is what you have done! There are basically two
ways to solve this problem."

Someone must have some idea of how this happens so frequently.

Larry

 

[Larry]

I see at the bottom of the article. which is written by Suzanne, that
she acknowledges that she is completely stumped by this. It's bizarre.
This is one of the most common issues people bring to the newsgroups,
yet apparently no one has any idea how it happens.

---------------
Help us solve a mystery
How does it happen that people who have never heard of Normal.dot and
don’t know how to find it, open it, or edit it somehow manage to save a
document in or as Normal.dot? It seems very unlikely. Is this a bug, or
is there some rational explanation? One MVP has theorized that perhaps
Word 2000/2002 users are accidentally selecting Normal.dot from the
History list in the File Open dialog, but many users who have this
problem are using Word 97, which doesn’t have the History. If you have
had this experience (and you probably have, or you wouldn’t be reading
this article) and have any ideas about how it could have happened, we’d
like to hear from you. Please pass your theories on to our Webmaster.
----------------

 

[Jay Freedman]

Hi, Larry,

When you consider the tens of millions of copies of Word that are in daily
use, the billions of documents they've created, and the enormous number of
combinations of other software running at the same time, it doesn't surprise
me that a few thousand weird things happen.

My theory -- unprovable, natch! -- is that some specific combination of
versions of Word, Windows, and some other program, possibly an add-in, cause
Word to pass the handle of the current document to the routine that saves
the attached template, when it should be passing the template's handle
instead. It's probably a typo in one line of code out of the hundreds of
thousands in Word's source. Since it happens unpredictably and doesn't cause
an error message when it happens, it's very hard to replicate. The programs
I'm responsible for in my work are much less massive than Word, and it's
still hard to track down intermittent bugs like this one.

 

[Larry]

Jay,

Your theory is interesting and seems plausible (though I know nothing
about the underlying issues you're describing--I don't even know what a
handle is). If you're right, then it's not some weird thing that the
user is doing. It's some weird uncontrollable (and un-catchable) oddity
in the software.

Larry

 

[Jay Freedman]

No, I don't think it's something users are doing, I think it's either in
Word itself or in some interaction between Word and other software. That
doesn't mean it's uncontrollable or un-catchable, but it does mean it would
take a very intensive effort to track it down -- and I haven't see any sign
yet that Microsoft thinks it's worth the effort.

One thing that makes it more difficult is that there isn't any error message
when this happens. The Watson crash-catcher (the dialog that pops up when a
program ends abnormally, and asks to send a report to Microsoft) has given
MS tons of information that it has already used to squash bugs -- but this
normal.dot problem doesn't trigger Watson, so no data are collected about
it.

One thing that might help is if everybody checked the option "Prompt to save
Normal template". But I'm not sure the bug would even trigger this dialog.

<geek> A handle is a number assigned to an open file. It's how the program
and the operating system communicate about read/write/save/delete operations
on files. You could think of it as an alias for the file name (although
actually it's the other way 'round). </geek>

 

[Bob S]

Since thousands of users have this problem, I wondered how it could
happen. And I just don't see it. Even if I inadvertently change the
Save as Type window in the Save As dialog box to Document Template, the
name of that document is not going to be "Normal.dot" unless I
deliberately type that in. So I can't figure for the life of me how
this is such a common problem.

One theory that I have seen:

If you have a Word icon on the quick-launch toolbar, and you
double-click it instead of single click it, you get two instances of
Word racing to lock the normal template, which can corrupt the
template, which can cause Word to ask if you want to recover it, which
will open Normal.dot itself for editing, and the user may not notice
this and type into it as though it were a document!

I have no evidence to confirm or deny this theory.

Bob S