Word XP crashes reading a Word Vista file

[djw]

We have a customer who has sent us an EMail with 3 attachments, 2 MS Word
documents and 1 Excel file.

We are running MS Office 2002 SP3 with all the latest updates (as of
10/10/07), including the patch that allows Office 2002 to read 2007 file
formats. Our customer is running Vista, so I assume they are running Office
2007 (??).

The files we were sent had the familiar file extensions - XLS and DOC so I
assume they have correctly set 2007 to create 2002 compatibly formatted
files.

The Word file contains a table with text entries. Nothing exotic or
complex. No macros - just text in a table. The Excel file contains similar
information - just text in cells.

When we go to open the files (directly from the Email attachment), the
correct software is automatically started (either Excel or Word), and the
document is read in - at least enough for the program to display the data
from the file, as the first screen of data is displayed.

Then, before there is a chance to do anything (one or two seconds after the
file is displayed on the screen), we get the "Microsoft Word has encountered
a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience." message
with the offer to send in an error report.

If I click on the "recover the data" box in the error dialog window, I
basically repeat the same process. Word displays the file name on the left,
and when I click on the name to recover the file, it displays the first
screen of data from the file and crashes again.

This same crash happens with both Word and Excel.

When the originator re-creates the files using the PDF format, they arrive
fine and we can view them.

Any suggestions?

Thanks for your help!....................Dave

 

[Jay Freedman]

Save the attachment to a real folder on your drive. Then use Word's
File > Open dialog, select the file, click the down arrow next to the
Open button, and choose "Open and Repair". That may get you a usable
document.

It's possible that the document was damaged in transit. It often helps
to get the sender to re-send the document as a zipped file. The zip
process uses a method (cyclic redundancy check, or CRC) that can tell
you if the file that you received is different, even by one byte, from
the file that was sent.

Further advice -- and this is for any Office file, not just the one
that's misbehaving -- don't open attachments directly from an email.
When you do that, the email app saves a copy into a temporary folder
before passing it to Word or Excel. If you don't think about what
you're doing and edit/save the document, it's saved into the temporary
folder, which vanishes as soon as you close the document, losing the
edits. Do yourself a favor and save the document to a real folder,
then open it from there.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the
newsgroup so all may benefit.