Re: "Out of Memory" Error Message When Using a Template

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Dear John,

This is a fabulous job of answering my question. It is all information I
need to know. Thank you. I am especially glad that I now have a name for
Advanced Maggies. I have been doing them for years, and now have a name for
them. I believe on the Windows side, there is a slightly hidden command for
"Open and Repair" that probably does this for you.
--
John Morley

"John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macinto" wrote:

Hi John:

Yes, "Out of Memory" these days almost never means that. It's an old error
message which basically means "I cannot find something that should have been
in memory by now."

In a commercial setting, particularly on a Mac, this often means the user
has a PC macro virus infecting their documents and templates. Because
they¹re on the Mac, the virus can¹t actually operate (beyond replicating
itself) because it was written in VBA two or three levels above the Mac.
But because they¹re not running an up-to-date virus program, the user
doesn't know they have a virus. The first thing to suggest is that they
update their virus scanner and run a full scan of their disk.

In the old days, this error usually meant the machine in question did not
have enough free memory to load whatever Word wanted. These days, it
usually means the internal structure of the document is broken so Word is
asking for something that does not exist; or that the user machine in
question is not up to date so the document contains something their machine
can't reproduce. For example, you can get this if you have Equation Editor
3 equations in a document opened on a copy of Word that has not gotten above
Equation Editor 2.

If you do a lot of complex edits to a document in an older product such as
Word 2004, it is not uncommon for the chain of deletions, insertions,
revisions and updates to become so complex that Word can no longer read its
own handwriting. You get a broken document. The damage is often to parts
of the internal code structure that are no longer in use. Word should clean
these up when it closes a document. However, if it can¹t read them, it
can¹t clean them. Word 2003 and Word 2007 have much greater ability to
clean this stuff up than Word 2004.

It usually pays to reform your document (an "Advanced Maggie") if you are
providing commercial solutions.

To do this:
1. Create a new blank Normal
2. Rename it to be the new template
3. Open it as a document
4. Very carefully copy all of the text EXCEPT the last paragraph mark.
5. Paste into the new template
6. Save the new and close the old
7. Use Organiser to transfer the toolbars, macros and customisations from
old to new.
8. Save again.

Most of the damage occurs in the various object containers that are hidden
below the last paragraph mark in a document. When you perform the copy,
Word re-creates any properties it needs in the new document. PROVIDED that
you do not have the last paragraph mark selected when you copy. If you do,
Word copies the old property container and thus copies the problem into the
new document/template.

Using the Organiser provides a convenient way to copy from the property
containers things such as toolbars, macros etc.

To be politically correct, you should do an Advanced Maggie on any template
before distributing it for commercial sale. Maggie is Margaret Secara from
the Word PC-L mailing list who spent many years teaching users how to
recover document corruption.

If the error is being generated from a document, not from your template, it
could be that the user does have too may edits! Users typically get the
first document right, then continue to open it and chop it around each time
they want a new document until eventually they break it. Nothing you can do
about that: tell them to start a clean copy from the template.

Or it could be that the users are trying to edit from within their email
program. If so, the reason Word can¹t find stuff is because it¹s in the
email program, not on the hard disk where it is expected to be. Word
expects the document to be the root of a filing structure: if the email
program is, nothing is where Word expects it to be. It may be that things
such as the template or the printer driver are invisible and that is what
it¹s complaining about.

Hope this helps

On 20/1/07 5:53 AM, in article
1169232783.008402.103150@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "John Morley"
<jmorley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

When opening a document attached to a Microsoft Word template that
includes many and extensive macros, the "Out of Memory" error occurs.
The Microsoft Knowledge Base attributes this to:

"This out-of-memory error message may indicate that the document
contains too many edits, rather than an insufficient amount of memory."

However, since the document is being opened (Change Tracking is not
turned on) there are no edits yet.

This is happening on a number of different computers and files (the
templates are a commercial product I sell). mostly running Word 2004
and OS 10.4 and above.

When the message is simply ignored, nothing bad seems to happen, but
error messages are always disconcerting and I would like something more
knowledgeable to say in tech support calls than, "Oh, you can just
ignore that."

Any help would be appreciated.


--

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

John McGhie <john@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Business Analyst, Consultant
Technical Writer.
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410


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