official from Microsoft re Word docs crashing?

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I know there have been similiar posts in the past.

Being a legal firm the predominant application used is Microsoft Word.

We work with alot of Word documents and come across word documents crashing.

People would like to know why word docs crash and how we can prevent this.

We are currently using Office XP and will be upgrading to Office 2007.

Has there been anything official from Microsoft about Word documents crashing? why do word documents crash etc?

diana

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You can search Google for word 2002 crash site:support.microsoft.com for Knowledge Base articles on Word crashing. I don’t think you’ll find a general overview of “why does my document crash”.

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Hi Diana
Is it possible that some of these documents were originally in WordPerfect? Particularly DOS based WordPerfect? The reason I ask is that I work a lot with (UK) law firms, and in my experience, there are still a fair few documents around that originated in WordPerfect. WordPerfect contained many formatting codes and, if these were not completely removed, the resultant Word document could become unstable – hanging & crashing. There was a code at the start of a converted WordPerfect document (sorry, can’t remember what it was) and there could be things like paragraph numbering codes in the document too. Generally, poorly formatted documents can cause some problems too.
Regards
Archie

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Hi Diana,

I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything official from Microsoft. In my experience, the thing that causes Word to crash (that is, not open, not print, not save to pdf…) is poor formatting. A (long) while back the closest MSFT came to an official statement was to support “best practices” to ensure healthy documents — which I believe they still do. You probably already know the list of causes, but in my experience, crashing (and even just oddities in formatting) has almost always been caused by:

• Relying on Word’s conversion process to convert a WP document (Word’s conversion originally assumed the document was going back to WordPerfect, which is why it retained all those codes). Much of what it left in the document was useless to Word and just took up space in perpetuity. Some was visible and could be removed, such as {UNKNOWN} fields, and some was invisible. Pieces of this document (or the whole document) can now be copied and pasted or used as the basis of a new document. (See the next item.)
• Copying a document to create a new document rather than creating a whole new document from a template. This is rather like making a xerox of a xerox of a xerox…
• Formatting solely or primarily with manual or direct formatting rather than styles. This is often a holdover from using WordPerfect, or just incomplete or nonexistant training.
• Hitting the Enter key to put space between paragraphs (“empty” paragraphs).
  [/list]These are the offenders I’ve seen most often in my business. Everybody has done one or all of these things at least once in a while, but multiply this by many users with many different methods of formatting, over many years and you’ll be lucky if only one or two documents crash. I work with a firm that used to have multiple crashes and missed deadlines on a weekly basis because of the above list. But since they’ve adjusted their work processes, it’s extremely rare to see a broken document.

  I did see a blog recently from someone working at MSFT — probably Office 2007 or Word 2007 blog — which said that direct formatting would not cause documents to corrupt (or words to that effect). I tend to believe this as Word 2007 has a significantly different document structure. If you create documents in Word 07 and save them as Word 03 or XP documents, I suspect these documents can still develop crash problems, so it’s still best to avoid items on the above list.

  I take just a little time when training to use liberal analogies and just enough background to explain why Word users should adopt practices that support the way Word was designed. Further, I’ve also found that once over the hump into using Word as designed, there is a significant decrease among the user population in comments like “I hate Word!” and “Word keeps changing my documents!” and, of course “I can’t print my document and the judge is waiting for it!!!!”

  You can’t ask your clients to adhere to best practices, but at least you’ll know what to do when one of their documents comes in the door.

  Kim

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kmurdock has pointed out that “Copying a document to create a new document rather than creating a whole new document from a template” may be asking for trouble.

I suppose that, if the new document is going to be an awful lot like that old document you wanted to copy, then you could first create a whole new document from a template and then copy the contents of the old document into the new document. Come to think of it, though, copying large amounts of text from one document to another in Word can also be asking for trouble, especially if there are differences in styles, outlines, etc. (Additional concern: Do you really know where that old document has been, and what it may have picked up along the way?)

It’s really safest, in many cases, to create a whole new document from a template and then completely retype all the stuff in the old document into the new document. If somebody’s determined to be a “corner cutter” and not do the retyping, and then their new document crashes — well, you can hardly blame Microsoft, can you?

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st3333ve is right in that you can copy and paste a whole lot of nasty stuff from existing Word documents.

However, I’ve found that in addition to creating a brand new document from a template, one can copy and paste text with great success if you don’t copy the formatting.

Start by creating a new document from a template.

Open the old document and select and copy the content you want. Click in the new document where you want the content to go and click Edit>Paste Special>Unformatted text. This technique will paste only the text. You’ll then have to work through the document formatting it, but if you use styles, even this can go pretty quickly.

K

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Do you really alternate?

If so, you can tell the single paragraph style to be followed by the double paragraph style, and vice versa (see screenshot). When you hit the enter key, the next paragraph is automatically the other style.

The reason you want to avoid “empty” paragraphs is that they are not simply a carriage return. The paragraph mark has information about formatting — if there was actually something there to format. And Word can handle this right up until it can’t.

A crock? Maybe, but Word has rules (some of them not very intuitive) and when you follow them, it works pretty well.

K

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I agree with the others that you should avoid using empty paragraphs, but mostly because it makes editing a document a lot more work. Frankly, I don’t believe it causes Word to crash.

Using style-based formatting prevents a lot of problems, it’ll save you a lot of time in the end, even if it takes more time to set up initially.

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“…but mostly because it makes editing a document a lot more work.”

I agree with this completely, but I’m not sure people who use that kind of formatting would agree with you. They’re used to those blank lines and it’s easier to use and remove them than to ponder Space Before and Space After.

“…I don’t believe it causes Word to crash.”

Well, maybe. I’ve seen too many oddities fixed by removing empty paragraphs to think they don’t at least contribute to a broken document. Perhaps it merely causes possible dizziness.

K

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“Hitting the Enter key to put space between paragraphs (“empty” paragraphs).”

We almost always put empty paragraphs between typed paragraphs – our users (1000’s) are more confortable with this. Admittedly I am no longer familiar with how typists/secretaries are taught today but most of the ones I come across are still used to having two returns after a paragrah. The documents are strictly controlled with styles, it’s just this bit that differs from what you other readers have said. I can honestly say that we do not have problems with these documents. From time to time, secondary formatting is also applied. Whereas I think Word styles are absolutely the bees knees, there are always occasions when a little secondary formatting – maybe emboldening a word or such like – is necessary and desirable. It is important, as kmurdock said, to follow Word’s rules and to format documents correctly but, in the real world, I believe there is also a need for a certain degree of flexibility.

I’ve found too that a quick fix to try for documents which are only a bit broken (!) can be to save them to html format and then back in to Word format – this can help when up against the Friday-at-5:30 deadline. However, if a document has been heavily & poorly edited, copy & paste special into a brand new document – and leaving out the last carriage return when selecting text – is the best route. If your styles are correctly defined then reformatting should be a reasonably quick process.

One thing that we also do to improve the stability of Word generally is to overwrite normal.dot every time a user logs in.

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ArchieDog, it sounds like your firm uses very consistent formatting, even with the empty returns. That makes a world of difference in a number of ways.

And you have to use direct formatting, otherwise how would you underline the case name? And am I really going to create and name a style for the one time in the document that I have to have extra Space After? (But I do tend to use Space After rather than an empty paragraph… you’ve gotta practice what you preach!)

K

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Hi liner,

Well, the first thing is to not modify the Normal style. It is the default style from which most other styles derive their formatting. If you change Normal, all other styles based on Normal, including Table Grid, will be affected, unless you then modify Table Grid style to have 0 space after. (You can see which style a style is based on by opening the Modify dialog — it’s right at the top.)

This may sound like a silly complication, but it helps to know a little about how styles work. First, all paragraphs have a style. Because of this, Word was obliged to start with a default style with a set of generic format attributes.

But because other styles derive their own formatting from Normal, the best thing is to NOT use Normal (and adjust it manually), but create a different set of styles (based on Normal or not) to format your document. Word comes with 100-plus built-in styles such as Body Text and Body Text 2 — try using these for your experiment.

Modify Body Text as the style you use most of the time and Body Text 2 as the style with extra space after. In Body Text, have it apply itself when you hit the enter key — this way you don’t have to “style” each paragraph, it styles itself. Then set Body Text 2 to apply Body Text, so when you’re finished with the paragraph that has the extra space, you’ll go back to your “default” style. When you get to the paragraph that will need extra space after, change the style for that one paragraph. If you can’t see Body Text or Body Text 2 in the style pane, click the drop-down at the bottom and choose “All styles.”

There are a bunch of ways to apply a style. Press Ctrl+Shift+S and your cursor will appear in the Styles drop-down on the formatting toolbar. In this example, “Body Text” should already be highlighted in the box. Hit the End key to add ” 2″ to the end of “Body Text” and press the Enter key. I’ve found the easiest is to map an often-used style to a key-combo on the keyboard. Then you don’t even need to take your hands off the keys to change styles while typing. You can also assign it to a toolbar, but keystrokes work great when you only have a handful of styles to use.

I know I sound like a style zealot, but I’ve worked with law firms for years and encountered mild to ferocious hostility toward Word and Microsoft. Not that it’s all unfounded, but I’ve found that making just a few small adjustments in the way folks work makes a huge difference.

K

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K

I would just like to clarify one of your points here. Let me start this by stating that there are many people who agree with you on avoiding using the Normal style. Whilst I disagree with this position, I do understand the thought processes that lead people to this decision. Whichever camp you are in is independent of the following discussion.

The ‘Table Grid’ style is actually a built-in table style – not a paragraph style (in the more recent versions of Word). You can see its name when you put the cursor inside a table when the cursor is sitting in a paragraph that also uses the Normal paragraph style. This is particularly odd since if the paragraph used ANY other paragraph style then that name would appear in the styles box instead . The definitive way to determine the table style used is to put your cursor to the right of any one of the table rows and look at the style name displayed.

The default action when you create a table is to create a table and apply the current paragraph style to each of the new table cells. Thus replacing Normal with Body Text would not solve the issue of modifying the paragraph spacing on the base style (and rippling into the tables) if that same style was used both in tables and in the rest of the content. Over time, this will be the exactly what happens if the users create the table when the cursor is sitting in an empty ‘Body Text’ paragraph. The only real fix is to apply a paragraph style to the tables after you create them (I use one called ‘Table Text’). You can choose to have this style based on ‘Body Text’ if you wish – but you can also decide to base this style on ‘No style’ to make it fully independent of any other style.

The considerable complexities of table styles mean that you are able to apply spacing before and after. In terms of paragraph spacing, this can be in direct conflict with the paragraph style settings and MAY override the paragraph style settings. This is one of the true pains of Word and therefore you should try to avoid putting too much paragraph formatting into your table style definitions and rely on the more consistent approach of letting the table style control the ‘table parameters’ and leave the paragraph formatting to correctly defined paragraph styles.

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You’re right Andrew. I glossed over this and missed the significance of the Table Grid style in my haste to make a point about inheriting attributes.

As far as Normal goes, I don’t avoid it, but use it — and edit it — with the same care that I give any other style. I think the important thing is to start working with styles, see what they do and what the rules are (including within tables ), and then use them to make document formatting easier and more consistent.

K

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Do you mean when you create a new document and start typing you want it to start out with a different style?

If you want *all* your documents to have this different style as a default, open the Normal.dot file in Word usually located at:

c:documents and settings[yourname]application datamicrosofttemplates

With your cursor next to the single paragraph mark on the page, apply the style you want as your new default. Save Normal.dot, close it, and any documents you create from then on will start you out with that style.

If you create different kinds of documents, each with their own defaults, create a document template for each of the default styles you want to use. The easiest way to do this is to open a new document, change the style of the single paragraph in it, then SaveAs and change the type from Word document (*.doc) to document template (*.dot) — Word will change the Save location to where your Normal.dot file is. Save it. When you want to create a document from that template, click File>New and choose your new template as the basis of the new document.

K

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hi all I’m back from leave

thanks all for your comments…yes mmm…food for thought.

yes I find that if you explain to users and give them guides they are receptive and does make a huge difference.

i do find if you follow Word rules and guidelines for heading styles, styles work a treat. Unfortunately alot of users don’t know how to work with styles properly and manually hack and apply formatting at the paragraphs.

ArchieDog – if each time a user logs on you overwrite normal.dot – doesn’t this annoy users if they have saved their customisations in normal.dot ie autotext and autocorrect entries shortcut keys etc. unless these customisations are saved into another template?

diana

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Hi Diana

I should say that our Word systems are highly customised and pretty tighly controlled. The idea is to have firm-wide standardisation.

With regard to overwriting normal.dot – autotext entries are stored in a separate, user-exclusive template; we tend to train users to make more use of autotext than autocorrect – I know some people train users to use autocorrect to insert text in much the same way as autotext does but that has other problems (e.g. limited number of characters). I believe that only some autocorrect entries (formatted text & graphics?) are stored in normal.dot with the other information being stored in the registry & .acl file. So far no one has complained about the autocorrect entries but perhaps they’re just being polite. Shortcut keys, menus, global custom toolbars etc. and vba customisation are all held in one or more global templates. We discourage users from customising their setup locally – if one user needs something that isn’t on the system then it is likely that others will too so we would evaluate the requirement and maybe apply it globally – but if it really has to be then we add a user-exclusive template in which they can customise the toolbars. Users don’t really create macros – standardisation & comprehensive customisation seems to do the trick.

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And the most necessary thing to change down here is font and default spelling. No-one wants Times New Roman nor English (US). Problem is that when there is corruption and you have to delete Normal.dot it gets recreated that way again. Don’t suppose there is a way to tweak that? (We usually keep a vanilla Normal.dot stashed away when needed – but it is one more thing to remember to do)

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