I open a document in Word, make changes, and save it. Word crashes on the
save, giving an error message like "Drive cannot be accessed", then offering
to save it elsewhere. When I select that option, Word crashes and shuts down.
It leaves behind 0 byte ~*.doc temporary files.
Has anyone else seen this?
--
Asad Abidi
UCLA EE Department
Always save to the local hard drive and then COPY to the removable media.
--
Terry Farrell - Word MVP
http://word.mvps.org/
"Asad Abidi" <Asad...@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:7A2DFF9C-7888-497E...@microsoft.com...
Thanks for the reply. The odd thing is that I have created Word files on
removable media for at least ten years: sciteq drives, zip drives, usb
drives, ... However, I have seen this problem only in the past few months. Is
this an outcome of the latest "improvements" to Word?
The first time this happened was when a proposal was due the next day. I
lost everything, and had to reconstruct the document in skeleton form from my
memory.
I'll stop doing this, but it's an easy enough mistake for others to
make---as your post implies. I think it is important to bring up this problem
with the Word development team. Word should know when it is writing to
removable media. BTW, the failure is repeatable, and Word aborts due to File
Permission error on the file.
Mission critical programs (ones on which funding depends!) should never
crash irrecoverably.
--
Asad Abidi
UCLA EE Department
I'll agree strongly with your last statement!
I think that you have been very lucky not to have corrupted documents
previously: it is far from uncommon. Without a major change tot he way Word
creates its files, I don't believe that there is much that can be done
except perhaps detect and warn against working directly with removable
media.
Terry
"Asad Abidi" <Asad...@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:567A8C97-7FC7-4E24...@microsoft.com...
I'll start following the HDD copy advice, and I'm sure it's very sound... So
thank you.
But isn't it strange that we're all experiencing these problems in the last
couple of months?
--
Al
Terry
"Al M" <A...@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:167156A3-83AA-43D1...@microsoft.com...
Thanks!
"Opening Office documents from removable storage
31 July 2008 - Office Watch
Since we wrote about removable drives and drive letters we've had long time
Office users asking about opening documents directly - should it be done at
all.
Many years ago, it wasn't a good idea to open a document directly from a
non local hard drive - meaning a floppy disk or network share.
Office users got into the habit of copying the document to a local drive,
working on it in Word / Excel / Powerpoint, closing the document then
copying it back to the floppy disk or network share.
In those days floppy disks were very slow and the few computers on networks
were also quite inefficient - plug-in USB hard drives were years in the
future. But the main problem was Office and especially Word - not only
would it open the document directly but all temporary or working files were
saved to the same location. With a floppy disk it was easy to run out of
disk space and even when you didn't get an error, Word ran very slowly.
These days things are quite different. Floppy disks are all but dead and
their replacement, USB 'sticks' are much more reliable and considerable
faster. Network performance and reliability has improved beyond belief.
Microsoft Office has long since fixed the problems of accessing non-local
drives. These days temporary files are saved to the local hard drive not
the same path as the document. Office 2007 / OOXML documents are much
smaller than their 'doc/xls/ppt' predecessors which reduces the disk
read/write requirements even more.
With all those changes over time, Office users are in a good position to
directly open documents from removable storage and work on them without a
pre/post copying ritual.
It may be faster and more reliable to temporarily copy a document to a
local drive while you work on it but usually that's not necessary."
So in many ways the answer is still better be safe than sorry... :)
Cheers,
Robert
-------------------------------------------------------
--
Cheers
Robert
--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
"Robert" <Rob...@nomail.com> wrote in message
news:9vz6quipc16k.1qp8d4lt1l3cg$.dlg@40tude.net...
I can only repeat that the best advice is to always save to the local (or
networked) HDD and COPY to and from removable media.
Terry Farrell
"schnitz76" <schn...@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:AB9B9A42-49CB-43AF...@microsoft.com...