Re: Word crashes when comparing documents.
rad...@officeformac.com
John McGhie
so we don't know what you're talking about. There's a bug on the server...
Word often crashes doing a compare if either document is complex and has
been heavily edited. A corruption Word can survive in a single document can
be too much for it if there are two documents in play.
Sorry: repeat your whole post and we'll have a better idea of how to help
you.
Cheers
On 20/06/09 5:59 AM, in article 59b76...@webcrossing.caR9absDaxw,
"rad...@officeformac.com" <rad...@officeformac.com> wrote:
--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/
Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.
John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Sydney, Australia. mailto:jo...@mcghie.name
Garutch
> Sadly, we didn't see your first note out here on the server where we work,
> so we don't know what you're talking about. There's a bug on the server...
>
> Word often crashes doing a compare if either document is complex and has
> been heavily edited. A corruption Word can survive in a single document can
> be too much for it if there are two documents in play.
>
> Sorry: repeat your whole post and we'll have a better idea of how to help
> you.
>
> Cheers
>
I'm a lawyer so it's pretty much all I do - it crashes consistently. I
deleted .plist files and have googled this but alas I am not alone.
Any one figure out how to trouble shoot this? Any use in posting my
error dump here?
Help.
> On 20/06/09 5:59 AM, in article 59b76e4...@webcrossing.caR9absDaxw,
>
> "rad...@officeformac.com" <rad...@officeformac.com> wrote:
> > another note, in reading my comments, I realize that I should have done a test
> > with my custom template. The foo/bar files compare successfully on word 2008
> > even when using my custom template.
>
> --
> Don't wait for your answer, click here:http://www.word.mvps.org/
>
> Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.
>
> John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
John McGhie
OK, let me answer to both of you:
1) Word generally is very unstable with lots of tracked changes in a
document.
2) This was one of the major fixes introduced in Word 2007. Word 2007 has
a whole new document compare/tracked changes engine, re-designed almost from
the ground up, to solve this very long-standing problem. It's not perfect,
but it is much improved.
3) No version of Mac Word has it yet.
The problem is "document complexity". If all of your formatting, and all of
your numbering, is done with styles, this simplifies the internal structure
of the document massively, and you won't get the problem.
Tables and lists are also a headache. Text pasted in from other documents
is also a problem: the formatting can be radically different. You fix it up
so it looks right, but beneath the surface, it's massively complex.
Yes, we know it should not be this way. But it is.
To prevent the crashing, the first thing to do is to clean up that document.
Begin by Resolving all of the tracked changes in both the old and the new
document. If you attempt to compare documents that already contain changes,
crashes are pretty much guaranteed.
Next, "Maggie" the document, to fix up its internal structure.
The Maggie:
1. Create a new blank document
2. Carefully select all of the text in the bad document EXCEPT the last
paragraph mark
3. Copy it.
4. Paste in the new document.
5. Save under a new file name and close all, then re-open.
This technique for de-corrupting is known as "Doing a 'Maggie'", after
Margaret Secara from the TECHWR-L mailing list, who first publicised the
technique.
And lastly, remove all of the formatting, and re-format the document using
only styles for both the formatting and the numbering.
If you do all of that, crashes will be quite rare.
And yes, in answer to Radvas, Word 2007 will be much more stable using
either compare or tracked changes. Particularly if it is running in the
.docx format, which is generally much more stable than the .doc format.
Hope this helps
On 3/07/09 7:42 AM, in article
5538f07c-0929-4a0f...@x25g2000prf.googlegroups.com, "Garutch"
<gregory...@gmail.com> wrote:
Sydney, Australia. mailto:jo...@mcghie.name