Re: What to do when Word constantly crashes?

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On Aug 15, 10:27 pm, John McGhie <j...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi Bill:

Many people around the Internet will waste a lot of your time "suggesting"
this and that wild goose for you to chase.

I will give it to you straight:  "There are some things you are doing in
those documents that cause Word to crash!"

Sorry about that, but unless you allow us to help you change your work
practices, Word will never be stable for you, and neither will any other
complex word-processor.

Word 2003 and Word 2007 are rock-solid on the PC.  I won't say they "never
crash", but I use them all day every day (I am a professional Technical
Writer) and I do not remember a crash from either in the past two years.

Word 2008 on the Mac is bug-city.  It is fearfully unstable, and we're all
waiting for the next version and hoping that that will be a lot more
reliable.

Sorry:  There was a lot of things the Macintosh Business Unit had to learn
about creating "Mission-critical stability" in the software it makes.  Let's
face it, this has been a painful journey for all large software developers:
Microsoft was one of the first to realise that being "The first to be wrong"
may mean you get to market faster than the other guy and maximise your
sales, but it keeps your products out of the "Mission-Critical" part of a
large company forever :-)  Mac BU has learned these things now, and we're
waiting for the next version, which we hope will contain the result of these
learnings :-)

However, there are things you can do on the Mac so Word 2008 will get you
through the day without a crash.  Let me list some of them:

1)  Keep the updates up to date.

That's the big one.  All these "Security Updates" they put out contain one
small "security" fix, and several unmentioned "bug fixes".

You haven't mentioned the Version or update level of the copy of Word you
are using, which makes it impossible to give you specific answers.  But I am
guessing from your crash history it's Word 2008, in which case Word>About
Word should tell you the "Last installed update" was 12.2.1", and if it
doesn't, nothing can help you until it does.

Your operating system is updating frequently.  And if you are using OS 10.5,
Word 2008 was not designed for it in the first place.  If you do not put in
the Microsoft updates to keep up with OS X, you end up with Office not
matching the system it is installed on, and it will crash, and that's the
reason.

2)  Stay away from the eye-candy shovelled into Word to divert the
easily-impressed.  These "features" are not built with the level of
stability and robustness of the "working" features designed for the
professionals.  Notebook Layout View, Publishing Layout View, Document
Elements, Quick Tables, and SmartArt are all like the neon signs outside a
bordello that promises you instant satisfaction.  They'll raise your
blood-pressure, certainly, but not from carnal desire :-)

If you use them, you get broken documents that crash a lot.

3)  The AutoRecovery mechanism is a piece of nonsense that provides almost
no protection: it's worse than useless, and best turned off.

AutoRecovery works by saving a list of changes to the main file.  If the
main file is unreadable, AutoRecovery can't work. And that's usually the
problem.

Instead, turn on "Always make backup".  That saves a complete document, not
a list of changes.  Every time you save, Always Make Backup saves the
previous version in the same folder, as a file named "Backup of...".  If
your document goes bang, close it, open the backup in Word, and save it over
the top of the original, and carry on.

4)  Don't use Tracked Changes.

Tracked changes creates an internal code structure that becomes
indescribably complex and highly dynamic.  It's a bad idea on the PC, on the
Mac, it's the kiss of death: Mac Word simply doesn't have the grunt to
handle a large file full of overlapping tracked changes.

Instead, resolve all the changes in the file and make a copy before you
begin editing.  When you're done editing, insert all of the changes in a
single operation using "Compare Documents".  Your crashes should stop!

5)  Avoid floating objects.  Floating pictures and floating tables are a
maintenance nightmare in any case; professionals avoid them.  But in Mac
Word, they're a constant source of trouble, again, because of bugs the
software is too fragile to cope with the sudden large changes in pagination
these objects can cause.

6)  Always be deeply suspicious of Footnotes.  Footnotes are a "complex
structure".  If the Author inserted them, and they're not a documentation
professional, expect trouble, you're going to get it :-)

7)  Keep it SIMPLE!  Gain an impression of how complex the code is in the
file you are working on.  Work in such a manner that you create simple
(non-complex) document code, and your files will survive a lot longer.

One of the more important suggestions is "Use Styles for ALL formatting."
That's very important in stopping this misery :-)

In your current case, you have a "Corrupt paragraph" in that document.
Replace it entirely:  Cut the paragraph to the clipboard, save and close the
document, re-open the document, and Paste>Special as "Unformatted Text" to
replace the paragraph.

Study Clive's book "Bend Word to your Will"http://word.mvps.org/Mac/Bend/BendWordToYourWill.html

The more of what he recommends that you do, the more reliable your Word work
will become.

PLEASE hang around in here and ask lots of questions.  I can't brain-dump
the entire proceeds of 40 years' of professional documentation work into you
in a single post.  But many of the people visiting here regularly have my
level of expertise and more!  And we really want you to have the benefit of
it: if you want it.

Hope this helps

On 16/08/09 5:18 AM, in article
b401f269-6a83-4182-8420-229559531...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "Bill
Heidbreder, Apt. 5C" <academicenglishedit...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I have owned two PCs and a Macintosh and on every computer and with
both operating systems and with every version of Word I use, it
frequently crashes.  On the Macintosh, I get a message that Word
encountered an unexpected problem and had to close.  I lose my work
since the last save, because the file recovery file is always fifteen
minutes out of date.  I save frequently, but even if I didn't lose
five minutes worth of work each time I would still lose a lot of time
because I am constantly having to reopen Word.  It may crash 20 times
in a day.  Just now I was working on a page and it crashed five
sucessive times while I was working on the same paragraph.  Does
anyone know anything that can be done about this?  I have to use
Microsoft Word because I am a professional editor and Apple's Pages
program is inadequate for the work I do.

This email is my business email -- Please do not email me about forum
matters unless you intend to pay!

 --

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP (Word, Mac Word), Consultant Technical Writer,
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
Sydney, Australia. | Ph: +61 (0)4 1209 1410
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:j...@xxxxxxxxxxx

I'm sorry that you say don't use Track Changes. I am a professional
editor and I have to use Track Changes because my clients need to be
able to accept or reject my edits. That's why I can't use Pages -
Apple's program has inferior Track Changes capabilities, and
specifically you cannot view the document with the deletions showing
only in the margins, which means that with Track Changes on the
document is unreadable and impossible to work with.

As for Word being stable on the PC, I wish it was stable on mine. I
have had two PCs, a desktop and a laptop, and Word frequently crashes
on my desktop and frequently crashed on my PC laptop before it died
and I replaced it with a Macintosh, hoping that Macintosh's greater
reliability would help me. Now, of course, I could partition my hard
drive and put Windows on one of the partitions and get Word for
Windows for my Macintosh and run it that way. But given my experience
with PC's and the fact that Word has always crashed very frequently
(right now as much as 30 or more times a day, sometimes every two
minutes), I don't have much confidence in the utility of doing that.
Plus Apple's other programs, except iWork, are generally superior to
Windows programs.

I tried reinstalling Office because the first time I forgot to remove
the old version. So I moved all the Office applications to the trash
can and reinstalled Office from the disk. Didn't make any difference;
still crashes. I tried installing updates, but I can't install
updates to Office because I get an error message that says that the
files needed to install Office updates are not on my hard drive. They
can't be on my backup hard drive, because it wasn't connected when I
installed Office the second time. As for changing the spotlight
preferences, I don't know how to do that. Maybe I'll call Apple and
ask them. If I can narrow this down to problems that are specific to
the machine or the operating system and not to MS Office, then Apple
will at least attempt to help me since I have Apple Care. Microsoft
will charge me $50 per phone call and won't necessarily help me, so I
would just be wasting my money.

I suspect there is no acceptable alternative to using Microsoft Word
for my purposes. I exchange files with my clients, returning the
files to them after I am finished editing them, and all of my clients
use Microsoft Word, so I have to either use Word or a program that
will save files in Word format. Pages will do that, but it's inferior
Track Changes feature renders it useless for my purposes, as
mentioned. So I am stuck wasting as much as an hour a day closing and
reopening Microsoft Word and redoing the previous five minutes worth
of work every time it crashes, 20, 30, 50 times a day. I suppose if
Microsoft could help me it would be worth paying them $50 since I lose
that much money every day in wasted time because of this problem, but
people tell me they are usually not very helpful, and they take your
money without even guaranteeing that they will solve your problem.
They told me they would probably just tell me to reinstall Office, and
I've done that. I thought buying a Macintosh would help me, but it
now seems to have made it worse, though I see no reason to believe
that switching back to Windows would be much of a solution. I am
curious why you say Office is stable on Windows/PC platforms when it
was never stable on either of mine. If someone were to convince me
that the solution was to run Office on my Mac under Windows, well then
of course I would do that, but then I would have to know why Word also
crashed on my PCs and what reason I have for believing it won't crash
under Windows again if I do that.

If this problem persists I suppose I could try to see if I could get
used to using Pages but it is awfully hard to edit a document when you
can't read it. For instance, I edit using Track Changes and then
review the text I've edited to make sure I didn't make any mistakes.
But with the way Track Changes displays in Pages I would have a devil
of a time trying to review an edited text, although I suppose I could
edit it in Pages and then convert it to Word for the review. But even
then it is hard to work with a text when you can't easily see what you
are doing. (You wind up with sentences that have both the deleted and
substituted words displaying, the deleted ones crossed out, and that
makes it very hard to read - you can imagine).


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