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Date: Thu, 23 Sep 2004 17:10:15 +0100
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Subject: Re: Problems with Word
From: Robert Stroud <>
To: Henry Lazarowicz <>
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Dear Henry,
In my experience, Word can often behave badly with heavily edited large documents, and you need to take some precautions. What I think happens is that the document gets corrupted and this causes Word to crash. So the problem lies with your document rather than Word, and re-installing Word won't help. I also think that some of the more advanced Word features interact badly - I turn off change tracking for example, because I can always reconstruct the changes between two versions of a document using "Compare documents". I'm also wary of EndNote and turn off the incremental formatting of citations which can slow things down.
Here are a couple of tricks that have worked for me in the past. Try doing regular "Save as..." rather than "Save". This forces Word to save a clean version of the file, rather than do an incremental save. Also, if you're really having problems, try cutting and pasting the entire text of the document into a new document. A colleague told me that at one point he was getting through a laptop a day(!) because Word was not just crashing, it was trashing his laptop as well. The solution was to cut and paste the document into a new document...
You might also find it worth looking at a web site run by Word experts called
I've included some advice from them that might be relevant below...
Good luck.
Robert Stroud
1. Have as few applications open as possible when working with long documents and/or documents containing a large number of graphics.
2. Make sure Fast Save (which should really be called Fast Corrupt!) is turned off (under Tools + Options + Save).
3. Save your document frequently, especially if editing graphics or Word drawing objects.
4. If you notice Word starting to slow down, quit Word immediately and go back in, to free up resources.
5. Delete your temporary files regularly, and always delete them immediately after a system crash or if Word crashes (in Windows Explorer, press Ctrl+F and search for ~*.*).
6. Back up your files regularly.
At 9:56 am +0100 23/9/04, Henry Lazarowicz wrote:
I am in the process of writing up my PhD thesis using Microsoft Word X (v10.1.4) on an old Powerbook G3 400 (512 Mb RAM) running Mac OS 10.2.8. I am also running Endnote 7 in the background.
With increasing frequency, Word is unexpectedly quitting and is now starting to corrupt some of my files. Apart from one incident, where one of the diagrams in the chapter became corrupted as a result, the quits are not reproducible.
I am finding this problem increasingly frustrating, as it is now practically becoming a daily occurrence and is sometimes happening more than once per day - In fact it has happened three times this morning already :-(
The whole thesis is set out as a Master Document using individual files for each chapter - I have even broken up some of the larger (graphic intense) chapters into separate files.
Does anyone out there have any suggestions or similar experiences with Word and large documents (200+ pages)? Should I reinstall Word from CD again or would I be better off re-installing the whole Office suite again and re-implementing the Service Updates? I would like to do this as painlessly as is possible.
If anyone out there have any suggestions, please let me know.
With many thanks in advance.
Mr. Henry Lazarowicz FRCS
Clinical Research Fellow
Northern Institute of Cancer Research