Problems with WORD; any experts?
 

Not sure if anyone has encountered the following problems or knows what to do about it?

I frequently have to make amendments to sections of an Ops manual. Although the original author of it, the pages I actually edit have been sent from our Publications department, and so are not the original files.

When, I start editing and adding sections, the document becomes unstable and grows to enormous size. e.g. a document I'm working on now of 32 pages has gone from 360 Kb to 27 Mb and when I tried to save it to a memory stick it became 103 Mb!

A solution I have found is to copy all the content and paste to a new document, but I can't see why the problem occurs in the first place, any clues?

The other thing that happens is that when I try to make words or paragraphs bold, the whole document reverses (main text bold, headings etc normal) and I have to click 'undo' to restore it to the intended result. Similarly with bullets; the whole document becomes bulleted until I undo the change and it goes how I wanted it to. Any ideas.

I'm using Word 2003 but have seen this problem in the past with Word 97 and XP.

Cheers

Have you got tracking changes on ? Is the language selection same for the original and editing machines, i.e., the normal.dot are they the same ?

May not be relevant, but if "fast saves" are enabled files can grow dramatically as all changes are saved rather than the finalised document.
MikeD

swh mentions tracking changes - use the revieing toolbar and accept all changes.

As for the text changing - find out what style the text you're modifying is, then make sure the "Automatically update" tick box for the style is UNTICKED !

Very Relevant, this is the cure for all the file growth problems I have had with Word.

Thanks a lot guys; I'll just go and try to work out what it all means then implement it! Cheers

In Word, click "Tools, Options" then select the "Save" tab.

If the "Allow fast saves" option is checked, that may be your problem ... try unchecking it.

RC

... or once happy, just resave with a different file name [ File .... Save As]. This will dramatically decrease the file size. Then rename the original to something else, then rename the updated file to the original name. Voila.