Word v.X document crashing on Windows machines

[Dave Yoffie]

I am having a weird problem with Word documents crashing on Windows
machines. I am editing (tracking changes) a contract that was delivered in
Windows from a lawyer, saving it in Word 10.1.4 on OS 10.2.8 and sending it
out to others for review. They open it, the document starts opening and
then Word crashes. It does it on all of the Windows machines (I will not be
successful convincing them to switch to Macs). They can open the starting
document. I have tried starting over from the initial document and doing
the edits again only to have the same result. I have even tried using
Workshare Protect to clean all of the metadata out of the starting document
to no avail. Other contracts I have edited from the same source produced at
essentially the same time do not exhibit this problem at all.

Any ideas?

Dave

 

[Beth Rosengard]

Hi Dave,

I don't know what's causing this but on the off-chance that the document
picked up some corruption, try this:

Turn on the Show/Hide formatting tool and carefully copy all but the very
last paragraph mark. Now paste into a blank new Word doc. Send the result
off to your Windows recipients and see if there's still a problem.

Hope this helps.

--
Beth Rosengard
Mac MVP

Mac Word FAQ: <http://www.mvps.org/word/FAQs/WordMac/index.htm>
Entourage Help Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org/toc.html>

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Dave:

Track Changes is a legendary source of corruption.

It is important when using tracked changes to be very careful around
paragraph marks and tables. Using tracked changes WITHIN a table is asking
for trouble. Having tracked changes take out a paragraph mark when the
following paragraph has a different format is "brave".

Keep your non-printing characters turned on when working with tracked
changes to ensure that you can see what you are doing.

To solve this specific problem, you may have to open the original document,
ACCEPT ALL CHANGES and then save, close and re-open the document and then
put your edits in again.

Beth's cure, if you have already done it, will work just as well.

Sorry: Track Changes is a very powerful tool and I use it a lot, but it
does break documents. You should never stack changes on changes: that's
asking for trouble: always start by Accepting All.

Your Windows users could fix the document themselves if they had a copy of
Word 2003 somewhere. Word 2003 can open such documents and repair them. So
can the next version of Mac Word.

Hope this helps