MS Word and complex documents

[Genghis the Engineer]

Has anybody else seen or solved this problem?

I'm running two versions of MS Word (both under XP). At home I have 2000, at work I have 2003, I take documents back and forth quite regularly using a pen-drive. So far so good.


Word 2000 has this deeply irritating bug. With a more complex document (by which I mean full of tables, pictures, Excel and Powerpoint inserts, document automation and so on), from time to time it refuses to save it, claiming that every disk drive available is full. I can read the document, print it, even paste it into an Email (but not send as an attachment), but can't save the damned thing - forcing me to close and lose my edits. The current document that's giving me the problem is about 2½Mb, the drives I have respectively have about 400Mb and 50Gb of spare space.

Word 2003 does not do this.


I suspect that I may have to bite the bullet and buy a copy of Word 2003 for home, but for all other purposes what I have at home is absolutely fine.

Needless to say, my copy of MS Office (and Win.XP) has all the relevant service packs and bug fixes uploaded and installed from Microsoft's website. Which made no difference whatsoever.


Thoughts anybody?

G

[CBLong]

Hi Genghis,

Long shot, and I know nothing of this particular bug in any version of Word, but is it possible that the problem is a lack of 'temporary' drive space? Some applications like to use the Windows 'temp' folder before eventually writing the file to its final location, and error message in such cases don't always give accurate information. My system used to have six partitions, and I would have problems when the Windows partition was full, even if the others had plenty of space.

If your home machine's Windows folder is on a third drive, other than the 400Mb- and 50Gb-free ones, this might be worth checking.

Crispy.

[Genghis the Engineer]

No joy, those are the main drives, I have a third with about 15Gb free - so can't see that being the snag, but thanks for the suggestion.

G

[Jhieminga]

I don't know if this will help the situation, but sometimes Word documents can get quite 'bloated'. Copying the entire contents to a new document (Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-N, Ctrl-V IIRC) and saving this one might clean up the document's internal bits and save some diskspace.
It could be worth trying this, to see if the new document with same contents displays the same behaviour.

[Genghis the Engineer]

Tried that already, an old trick to reduce document size.

Didn't work.

G :{

[Mac the Knife]

Welcome to the world of Microsoft "compatibility".

Despite their self serving fluff about consistent document formats, every new version of Word has a slightly different "improved" data format, the inner workings of which are proprietary. Old versions of MS Office cannot read documents created in newer versions reliably. Plain documents are usually OK, but complex documents are rarely backward readable.

The reason of course is to force people to do what MS would like to force you to do - upgrade to the latest and greatest version of MSOffice.

To use the much heralded MSOffice 12 will require that you purchase the new Microsoft Vista OS, which in turn will mean that you may well need a new PC since Vista's requirements are not small.

MSOffice 12 is planned to use an open XML document format, but with a twist - it won't be the OASIS Open Document Format agreed upon by a huge majority of players worldwide (Apple, Sun, IBM etc,. etc.). Curiously MS was a member of the orginal consortium that decided on the format, but Microsoft decided instead to go for it's own "improved" version - MSXML

Nominally open, MSXML nevertheless contains proprietary binary extensions which will render it's readability by non-MS applications dodgy to say the least. This is a last desperate attempt by MS to maintain their enforced lock on Office applications and therefore force you to go on buying their overpriced and buggy software.

Ghengis, I'd take this as a fairly distinct wake-up call to say goodbye to Microsoft.

The new OpenOffice.org's OpenOffice 2 is now out and available for free download from http://www.openoffice.org/ - OpenOffice is completely free to use and install on as many machines as you like.

OpenOffice uses the OASIS OpenDocument XML format by default, but can read, save and create documents in Microsoft formats using reverse engineering techniques. It too may stumble over complex documents, but as you have found out, so do Microsoft's own pricey offerings.

Time to say good bye to the world of Microsoft "compatibility" and get off their gouging upgrade merrygoround I think.

Not only the Commonwealth of Massachusetts but much of the rest of the world is moving towards a truly open and universal data format which is independent of the application used to create of read it, whether this be commercial or open source.

It's just too dangerous to allow one company (already with multiple convictions for abusive and monopolistic acts) to lock up the world's information in it's own proprietary and secret formats.

Edited to add: OpenOffice is of course available for a variety of operating systems:-

Windows
Linux (x86 and PPC)
Solaris (SPARC and x86)
FreeBSD
Mackintosh

So your chum on his mainframe or Mac will use exactly the same program to open your Windows documents and see exectly what you saw. Nice thought (and the way it should be).

[hobie]

If you really want to stay with word 2003, and I must admit I've always been a fan, you can pick up an upgrade online for about 76 green ones (are stg pounds still green? :) )
Not a lot of dosh to stay where you feel safe and comfortable :p

[stickyb]

I think if you turn off the fast save option you may solve the problem in 2000

[Genghis the Engineer]

AHA, something I've not tried.

Sat at my Office 2003 work PC at the moment, but will give that a go this evening and report back.

G

[mikeddavies]

"Fast Saves" is one of the worst defaults of Word! Any changes are added onto the document, then further changes are added etc. when loading, the original is opened and the subsequent changes are then added one after the other, taking longer and longer - eventaully the document is too large to save even if the finished item is only one page long! Select "always create a backup" at least you can easily go back from a disasterous editing session.
MikeD

[ProofReader]

This is also a problem I've had in the past when I've been running Adobe Acrobat in the same session. The two programmes don't seem to like each other! If you've even been viewing a .pdf (with Acrobat) file during your 'computing session', you may need to reboot before you reopen the Word document.

However, I think that the fast save option being turned off may well be the answer - dastardly thing that feature!

[kriss1000]

Agree with the above Fast Save issue.
On another note you take work home then I believe answer get your company to buy you the upgrade...

[Genghis the Engineer]

I believe answer get your company to buy you the upgrade...
Problem is, they may respond "spend all your time in the office and it's not a problem".

In the meantime, it turns out that the "fast save" option was always turned off. So, I tried turning it on - no change. I tried turning it off again - no change.

Aaaarrrggghhhhh !

G

(And this was in a session where I'd not run Acrobat reader).

[stickyb]

Genghis, sorry for the duff suggestion. Have you tried "save as" with a diff filename and type rtf?
ALso, do you have any maths equations in the document?
Have you checked the following MS articles?
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q224041
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/224031/EN-US/
http://support.microsoft.com/?scid=http%3a%2f%2fwww.support.microsoft.com%2fkb%2f873101%2 f

[Genghis the Engineer]

Thanks Sticky, I think that you've put your finger on it.

Yes, I'm a heavy user of MS Equation editor, and all the documents that I've had the problem with have been ones in which I've had a lot of embedded equations.

Looking at that first link, it shows four workarounds, unfortunately none of which are acceptable to me, because I need to keep my equations editable, as well as requiring a lot of the other MS Word functionality that is incompatible with RTF.

So, it looks sadly as if an upgrade to 2003 is the way ahead. Ho Hum.

G

[Mac the Knife]

Mr. Gates WILL be pleased....

By-the-bye, OpenOffice has more than just an equation editor - the built-in OOo Math application is a full blown higher maths app. and designed specifically for people like Ghengis.

[Tinstaafl]

I endorse OOo too. Free, open source & uses open document format so no vendor lock in or forced upgrades. :ok:

[Mac the Knife]

A quote:

"OpenDocument, which OpenOffice.org uses, is approved by OASIS - the standards body for XML data formats in business; OASIS is sponsored by all the leading names in IT, including Microsoft. In addition, OpenDocument was submitted to the International Organisation for Standardization (ISO) on 30 September 2005 for ratification. OpenDocument is a genuine vendor-neutral, open-standard specification free from intellectual property encumbrances. All developers are free to work with it."
Apart from it's native OpenDocument format, OOo can open and save documents in:-

Microsoft Word 97/2000/XP (.doc)
Microsoft Word 95 (.doc)
Rich Test Format (.rtf)
All the Starwriter formats (essentially the same as OOo)
Text (.txt)
Text Encoded (.txt)
HTML Document (.html)
Aportis Doc (Palm) (.pdb)
DocBook (.xml)
Microsoft Word 2003XML (.xml)
Pocket Word (.psw)

No one is asking Microsoft to abandon their beloved proprietary formats (ironically, one of the reasons why Microsoft clings to it's own proprietary variant of XML is because this contains embedded binary code to make it easier to read the old MS formats), but merely to permit the creation of OpenDocument data.

Microsoft could very easily have added support for OpenDocument as well as it's own proprietary MSXML format in Microsoft Office but chose not to. They wish to retain control of the office document standard and replace a truly open format with their own semi-open one. A great pity, since Microsoft Office is an excellent suite, but too bad for Microsoft.

The world is headed towards truly open formats for document storage for very sound business reasons. For many years Microsoft have "owned" most of the world's documents and profited greatly thereby, but times change and governments (like Massachusetts) and businesses (and users) are increasingly unhappy with this arrangement.

With closed formats the continued readability of a document base is essentially dependent upon the health and mercy of the owner of the proprietary format, which cannot be guaranteed. Many many users like Ghengis are fed up with the upgrade treadmill and the difficulties of exchanging documents.

The times are a'changing and Microsoft can either recognise that it's days of rich picking are over and make a bit less profit, or be steadily marginalised.

This doesn't help Ghengis, but it's worth thinking about.

[SoftTop]

you've probably been through this already, but, have you switched on the track changes thing? if so try accepting all changes.

I don't know if that will help, but hey, any port in a storm.

ST

[Genghis the Engineer]

Nope, track changes has never been used on any of the offending documents.

I'll try this open-office thing and see what happens. But, I confess I've been using MS Word since about version 3 circa 1982 and have always been rather fond of it (when I started, everybody else thought it was poor and preferred either Wordstar or Wordperfect). Plus, work do provide me with W2003 for free on one PC.

Will report back,

G

[Mac the Knife]

Ghengis, the insuperable problem in your case is that Word 2000 doesn't fully understand the files created with Word 2003. It's not a question of fast saves or change tracking, the saved document format is subtly different between the two.

If it's really a nuisance then get a copy of MSOffice 2003, the Student/Teacher edition is quite cheap. Sometimes it's just easier to give in and be screwed.

If these are complex documents then you won't be happy in a mixed OpenOffice/MSOffice world (unless MS switches to standard XML).

Be interesting to hear your comments on OOo though.

PS: So you're an old Wordstarian too.. WS7d was superb in it's time and still has adherents today. I've even got a copy, but it doesn't understand my printers.

[SoftTop]

Mac - that last post struck a chord. I've just speed read (not very well probably) the entire thread and can't see any mention of using the "Save As" option.

Genghis, have you tried saving from Word 2003 using the Save As ... Word 2000 option?

ST

(now grabbing at straws!)

[Genghis the Engineer]

I'll have a look at the "save as" options in Word 2003 when I'm back in the office, but suspect still that a teachers edition of Office 2003 is probably the way ahead.

That said, I had this problem occasionally before upgrading to Word 2003 at work, just not so often, so I'm not certain that'll solve it.


In the meantime, I installed OO. Clearly it does everything I want in terms of functionality, but on a first try...

- It clearly uses enormous amounts of computing power, and my PC ran noticeably slower. Since it's a reasonably new 2.8GHz Celeron, this shouldn't be happening.

- It mucked up the format of my tables, although this was reasonably quick and easy to solve.

- Equations! Some of my equations it regarded as pictures and wouldn't edit. Some other equations, it would open - in a partial load of MS Equation Editor, but missing the "insert characters" bit, so whilst I could move the characters around, I couldn't insert any new ones that weren't on the keyboard.

- I saved it, then re-opened it in Word. Going down the page, everything was still fine, except the equations. Several (not necessarily ones I'd edited in OO) were mucked up completely and I couldn't recover. (They'd sort of turned into vertical lines one pixel thick, very odd).


So, first impressions are that it's sort of there but not quite. The amount of computing power it seems to use, together with the fact that it doesn't handle Word Tables or Equations all that well (and that I've got several Mb worth of them on my HD that I use, read, cut-and-paste from almost daily) works against it in my view at the moment.

But, I shall leave it on for a while and play.

G

[Mac the Knife]

Yes, you're right - OpenOffice is significantly slower and more resource hungry than MSOffice, see http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=120 - and - http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=119

You get what you pay for (or rather, don't pay for). OTOH, OpenOffice is evolving very fast and improving speed is high on the developers priority list. Several revisions will appear this year and by the time OOo 3.0 appears much of this should have been remedied.

The troubles interpreting MSOffice files are hardly OOo's fault - the Microsoft data formats are secret and OOo has to black-box reverse engineer them. It's amazing that they have achieved the level of compatibility that they do have. Simpler documents do not have these problems - I don't normally read or create complex documents and have no problems.

"....I shall leave it on for a while and play..." seems like a good plan.

[Genghis the Engineer]

Sadly, if I didn't tend to regularly create and edit complex documents, I'd never have asked the question in the first place.

It's interesting by comparison the way my lecturing style has gone over the last dozen years.

I started with a combination of 35mm slides and OHP, via slides and video, then powerpoint, now I mostly use a whiteboard/blackboard - give me a couple more years and I'll probably just stand and talk. Similarly, there's much to be said for a pencil sometimes!

G

[shuttlebus]

GTE,

Have you tried altering the "Compatibility settings" under TOOLS>OPTIONS in Word 2003?

Try setting this to Word 2000 or whatever and see if this makes a difference...

The comapny I work for has about 7000+ people worldwide and although the majoority of offices now run Word 2003 (global roll-out :-), we still need backwards compatibility for the staff to be able to work from home etc.

Our default is to have compatibility set to Word 97 and no-one seems to have any problems....

Just another one to try before you abandon Word.

Regards,

Shuttlebus

[Mac the Knife]

Abiword - http://www.abiword.com/ - is a serious cross-platform wordprocessor with some heavyweight abilities. In some ways I prefer it to OOo Writer. It can import and export OpenDocument files, but is more aimed at cross-platformability and Word (.doc) use.

"Presently, AbiWord can open most Microsoft Word documents well. However, if the document has complicated tables, text boxes, embedded spreadsheets, and so forth, then it might not work as expected. Developing good MS Word filters is a very difficult process, so please bear with us as we work on getting Word documents to open correctly. If you have a Word document which fails to load, please open a Bug and include the document so we can improve the importer.

Saving as .doc - AbiWord can currently save in an MS Word compatible ".doc" format. This is done by saving as Rich Text Format (.rtf) but with a .doc extension. The file extension does not mean that the file is a binary Microsoft Word document and .doc may contain RTF, HTML or plain text. This is a feature — Microsoft themselves have used .doc to exploit a mis-feature of MS-Word.

Some developers and even a few users have suggested that this is dishonest and 'cheating'. In fact this 'cheating' is something Microsoft themselves have done in their own software! (Example: MS Wordpad on Windows 98 claims to save as Microsoft Word 6.0 (.doc) but if you look at the files in a text editor you can see that it is in fact Rich Text Format). There are no plans to support binary MS Word export."

http://www.abiword.com/screenshots/abi-win32.jpg

I like Abiword a lot, but I think that OpenOffice have the right idea going with the OASIS OpenDocument format - I'm pretty sure that's where we'll mostly be in 2010 (and thank goodness for that!).

[Genghis the Engineer]

Well I've set my compatibility options to Word 2000, but looking at the list of things in there, I doubt that it'll make any difference.

I've also looked in the save options, but there isn't a "save as Word 2000" option, only save as Word 97, which I can't do because I know there are things I do with tables (merging cells vertically for example) that will be mucked up.

Looks like spending money is it :{

G

[ProofReader]

... there's much to be said for a pencil sometimes!
Constipated mathematicians work it out with a pencil!!! :eek: :ugh: Sorry, I couldn't resist!

G, do you work with master and sub documents or do you have everything in one humungous document? If you broke it down into master and sub docs, would that make it easier to edit the Word2000 compatible bits without stuffing up the whole document?

*sigh, just a thought* http://i9.photobucket.com/albums/a97/ProofReader/Emoticons/Shrug.gif

[Genghis the Engineer]

Yes and sort-of.

For bigger documents I do work with master and sub-documents, and this does help.

Right at the moment I'm writing a textbook, which currently is only 2½Mb and about 60 pages, so I can't honestly see that it'll help much, just become a blasted nuisance to me.

G

[Blacksheep]

Genghis,
We were just visited by the Microshaft sales team yesterday - trying to sell us on their "Select" agreements. During the discussions it was highlighted that where we have a user license at the office, a user is entitled to use the license on one other PC - either at home or on a notebook. Check with your IT department to see if this applies to your outfit. If it does, it might save you from having to buy Word 2003 for yourself.

[stickyb]

Genghis, one of the msoft articles talks about doing ctrl+a to select everything then F9 to update the field codes. This should allow you to see exactly which line has the problem, then maybe you could edit/reconstruct that line and then try saving?

[Genghis the Engineer]

Genghis,
We were just visited by the Microshaft sales team yesterday - trying to sell us on their "Select" agreements. During the discussions it was highlighted that where we have a user license at the office, a user is entitled to use the license on one other PC - either at home or on a notebook. Check with your IT department to see if this applies to your outfit. If it does, it might save you from having to buy Word 2003 for yourself.
I'm on that already, just waiting to hear back.

G

[Mac the Knife]

Just make sure you tell them you're thinking of switching to OpenOffice, that'll bring them out in a veritable rash of discounts!

Teasing MS sales reps can be quite fun.

"Select" is it? - they ARE getting worried! Maybe soon they'll have to pay us to use their software........

[Blacksheep]

...tell them you're thinking of switching to OpenOfficeWe are using OpenOffice 2.0 on half our workstations. We only deploy MS Office on selected desktops where the user actually needs the fancier capabilities of Word, Excel, Access or Powerpoint. The majority of desktop users only write memos or spreadsheets with a single worksheet and don't need the full features of desktop publishing or multi-worksheet spreadsheets. In fact, quite a few use mainly specialist applications, communicate via e-mail rather than memo and only need file readers to open e-mail attachments.

If you want to really put the wind up a Microshaft "tax collector", tell him you're thinking of running all your servers on Linux... :}