Problem in a table

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Hi,

A user has sent me a table showing some rather strange behaviour (Word 2000 SR-1) (It completely hangs in Word 97, so don’t even think of trying it there).

When the document is opened, it starts repaginating without stopping.

Becuase of the repaginating, it’s not possible to Print Preview or view in Page Layout.

It looks as if somehow, the table is connecting itself to itself.

I can reproduce the behaviour by copying the two rows into another document.

I can solve this by deleting the top row. But I’d like to get a thought on what might be causing the behaviour.

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Hmm. This is different!
Long shot, but before opening the document try turning off background pagination. In Word97 it’s found under Tools, Options, General. I’ve saved your attachment to disk to open at another pc. I came across similar behavior only once before and that was because there was a macro that acted as a never ending “loop”. Did you have a chance to check out any macro/calculation/formulae before it starting doing the loop-de-loop?

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P_

(if I may call you that)

The repagination option was greyed out in W2K, but I don’t think that mattered in this context.

There were definitely no macros- that’s the first thing I looked at.

Any calculation/formulae should have showed up when I showed all formatting (Tools, options, then clicking everything I could). That was the next thing I did.

The fact that I could paste the rows into a new document and still have the same problems I guess would have eliminated the macro option.

There were other symptons which seemed to show something abnormal. When showing all the formatting, I tried to highlight what appeared as a small square. If I hit “Enter”, a new row was inserted into the table. If I cahnged the contents of row 2 cell 1, saved, and reopened, the changed contents appeared in row 1.

I assume somehow there was a reference within the table (internally) telling Word to look at another location in deciding what to do next (possibly in reagrd to building a table. I’d guess that this is the way that it can embed a table within a table in W2K). But it was a circular reference. So it keeps on expanding itself, and disappearing wherever these things disappear to.

It certainlt was “different” as you suggest. Thanks for you contribution.

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Hi Geoff:
I have a suspicion it may originally have been an Excel worksheet. Is it possible that Mary C. gave you what used to be an Excel document? i.e. someone decided they would rather work in Word and did SA Word doc?
Paddy

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Paddy,

That’s possible. I’ll have to check when work hours resume.

My thought was that it’s MS’s “table within table” stuff in W2K that’s somehow got screwed up.

Yeah, I know MS doesn’t ever do things wrong- it’s pretty far-fetched- but a possibility all the same.

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Hi Geoff:

I looked at the document thru Quick View Plus as text to see if anything made sense. I get the feeling that some connection with a footer may be involved, & saw nothing that led me to believe that the table came from Excel (but I could be reading it wrong).

Part of the text read:
Mary Carpenter.C:WINDOWSDesktopSpell Check Fieldstest.docMary Carpenter/C:WINDOWSDesktopSpell Check Fieldstest2.docGeoff WhitfieldYC:WINNTProfilesgeoffApplication

& also

“Root Entry F$1TableWordDocumentSummaryInformation(DocumentSummaryInformation8CompObjjObjectPool
FMicrosoft Word Document
MSWordDocWord.Document.89q

I also tried to backspace purportedly while in the middle of a table cell & received the message that it wasn’t a valid action for the end of a table. So while all this leads to a corrupt table, it doesn’t seem to say how it got there.

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Phil,

Thanks for that.

I knew it was a long shot- I guess it’s only answerable in the end by someone who has had the same problem, and who can remember the sequence (assuming it was a user sequence which caused the problem).

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Dear all

There are 49 characters (without spaces) and 55 (with spaces, with 7 words. This means that the strange behaviour is because something haas got into the file object, which is not caught by the character count. I tried emulating this problem, to no avail.

However, by opening it with the Recover Text from any file Option, and cutting out all the mess, I could recreate a file the same size with same word and character count, in the form of a 2×2 table containing the follg text :

Suggested Improvement System Admin Response
The Payroll

Does that give anyone any leads?

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Did anyone notice that there are no end-of-cell markers in the first row? There are paragraph marks. I tried a search and replace on ^p to ^7^13 (the ascii codes for end of cell), but it wouldn’t replace the paragraph marks. I then tried searching on ^10 and a different search on ^13 (the components of a paragraph mark) and neither of those worked. Something is corrupt in that table and I’m convinced it’s in the first row.

Regards,

Chris

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Hi Chris – I agree. On my home pc I had copied & saved the doc with a .wpd extension & when I clicked on it in Explorer Excel opened (re my earlier post wondering if it might have previously been an Excel doc).
Today I finally had an opportunity to open it in Word2000. It does look as if the trouble is in the first row. I found the same things that Geoff, jscher and Rajesh did. It also went into endless pagination!! I tried a variety of things just because I like to know why docs behave in a sometimes bizarre fashion.
In Word2000 text after the “square hollow boxes” appeared to be footer (or header?) text. I tried highlighting the boxes and clicking on them & got message re Unicode font stuff. (Sorry about the ambiguity here but I don’t have Word2000 at home & was really busy at office today to do scrn shots or make notes).
I opened it as a text only file and found lots of column breaks. Then I copied the original file, made mock changes, ran CompareRite (sometimes this is a good diagostic tool) & got a message along the lines of ‘Changes may be lost in saving as Word 6.0/95 document. Huh? Weird and weirder. Oh well, unless Geoff W finds out some other info I guess it’s just another corrupt document. As Phil noted doesn’t seem to be any indication of how it got there.
I don’t like it when I can’t find the answers!

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[indent]

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I don’t like it when I can’t find the answers!

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I totally agree. That’s why I posted in the first place!

Unfortunately, I think I can only agree that it’s corrupt, and leave it like that.

Thanks for the help.

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Geoff –

Before you give up all hope, check one thing. Look at Format/Paragraph/Line and Page Breaks and see if there are several paragraphs in a row with Keep With Next and Keep Lines Together BOTH applied. That will cause the pagination problems you describe. With your show/hide button on, paragraphs with either of these formatting choices will show a small black square in the left margin.

Lee Morgan

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Hi Gary
First, Re: “P_ …if I may call you that”: Not a friendly signature for sure so try “Paddy” as a handle. [It’s been on my list of “to do’s” to change my sig on WOPR but I’ve been soooooo busy it is dropped to the bottom of my “to do’s”. Also want to add in Drk Realms flag for a “Fractured Canadian” flag].
Back to the problem table: Are there links back to another doc(s)?
Hope I’ll have time later today to look at the file & check this out further. I love Word challenges but suspect the great brains on this board will come up with the answer before I get a chance to do any detective work. If not, I’ll be back!

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1. In Normal view, it opens as a 2×2 table.
2. Flipping to Print Preview starts the endless repagination, but Esc allows one to return to Normal view.
3. Converting to text (separated by tabs) seems to make one of the columns disappear.
4. Copying the left column and pasting returns the below message.

I think I’ll stop here!

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Jeff,

Thanks for trying that out.

I had tried the “convert to text” on a row, but not on a single cell or column. I came to grief on that as well.

So I guess the conclusion is that it is corrupt. I don’t know how it came about- but for next time, I’ll know how to fix it.

Thanks for your help

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