Word 2007 ‘Open and Repair’ msg too often for DOC files with many tables

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I found that certain Word documents which contain upwards of 20 or 30 small tables (2 or 3 rows, 4 or 5 columns, apiece), work fine as long as a user is working withing the document originally in Word 2007, but after saving as a DOC and re-opening, the user is prompted to do an “Open and Repair” and there is frequent corruption around a table within the document. Usually there are missing end-of-cell or end-of-table markers (according to the Repair message box).

We are using the DOC format instead of DOCX.

Is something known to be systematically worse about Word 2007 saving to DOC format instead of DOCX?

All of the PCs in my firm are configured with Windows XP SP3, and Office 2007 SP2. For reasons of compatibility with other systems, we work with the following two Registry values set:

HKCUSoftwareMicrosoftOffice12.0WordOptions
DefaultFormat REG_SZ “doc”
CompatMode REG_DWORD 00000001

These cause MS Word 2007 to be in a 2003 “compatibility mode” and to save files in a DOC format by default.

Anyhow upon reopening a DOC document, the message from Word saying I need to do an ‘Open and Repair’ is happening a lot. Something like 50% of the time (for documents containing 20 to 30 tables).

I recall that with MS Excel 2007 there was an issue saving to the XLS format and seeing all cells turn to #VALUE and a message appearing saying “File error: data may have been lost.” This only occured with Excel 2007 saving as XLS and inconsistently. I wonder if this is a parallel case with Word 2007 not creating fully correct DOC files.

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I can’t recall any threads on this.

Do all the problem documents share a common ancestor? I’m wondering whether some corruption crept in at some point that Word 2003 was able to handle but which Word 2007 dislikes.

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If these tables originated in a previous version of Word, it’s very likely that Word 2007 doesn’t like them. I’ve had problems with “old” tables; Word displays a message that says one or more tables in the document is corrupt. These tables are trouble-free in previous versions of Word.

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Just as a test, what happens if you create some documents like this and save them as 2007/.docx documents, and then reopen them?

Also, if you still have access to a PC with Word 2003 on it, what happens when you open these problem documents in Word 2003 – do they open with no errors?

What is the source of the tables being created in the new documents? – are they being created from scratch using Word’s built-in tools, or are they being pasted into the document from some other source?

Do the tables by any chance have Text Wrapping set to ‘Around’?
Do any of the table cells by any chance have floating graphics in them?
(those are both things that can make tables go bad)

Gary

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