
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. On Tuesday, June 17th, 2003 at 5:03 pm and is filed under Macintosh. A bad Word crash at the wrong time and the consequences could be disastrous. The only solution in such cases is to select the entire document, copy it to the Clipboard, close the document without saving it, reopen it, select all, and paste over. These changes might be spread over 30 or 50 paragraphs. There is no way that you can expect the user to remember the last ten changes he made since he last saved the document. When the bug hits you in such a situation (and it will, sooner or later), you cannot just copy the last 2 or 3 paragraphs of text to the Clipboard and close the document without saving. Because, typically, editing a text involves making all kinds of little changes here and there in the text. But it’s even worse when you are not actually writing a new text, but editing an existing text in an existing Word document. Just a few paragraph and character styles used here and there. It’s a regular article, with no picture, no tables, no nothing. I am just writing a bloody article, for crying out loud! In its finished form, the article is approximately 2,500 words.

And guess what? After half an hour, I get the same alert again! This is not offensive. Then I start working on the article again.
#OPEN MELLEL DOC ON PC HOW TO#
Since I know all about this bug and how to work around it, I just copy the last few paragraphs I’ve typed (which are presumably not part of the last version saved) to the Clipboard, I close the document without saving it, I quit Word, I relaunch it, I reopen the document, I go to where I was, I paste the Clipboard and clean up whatever extra text this procedure has produced. I use it in a perfectly normal fashion, and I get this.Īnd not just once. I’ve done everything that can reasonably be expected from me in order to ensure that Word works reliably. My “Normal” template and my article template were both rebuilt from scratch a few months ago in order to prove to an MVP that the problem was not some kind of outstanding corruption left over from previous versions of Word.
#OPEN MELLEL DOC ON PC SOFTWARE#
I mean, here I am, going about my business, using my computer and my software as it’s supposed to be used, and after one hour of normal work, I get this? Unacceptable.

And it’s a real pain in the you-know-what. Make no mistake: In spite of the different phrasing (“Word cannot complete the operation because too many files are open.”), this is the exact same bug as the one known as the “Disk is Full” bug. Yet, after about one hour of writing and saving and writing and saving and pausing and writing and saving and so on, here’s what I got: Me and Word, we go way back.Īll this is to say that, while I was probably saving a bit more frequently than the average user, I wasn’t exactly abusing the software. I guess I’ve been traumatized by a few episodes of major data loss due to Word’s unreliability. As I said, I’m a bit neurotic about the whole thing. You never know what might happen during a pause. I depends on when I pause to reflect on something. On average, I would say I use the command after every paragraph (i.e. Since I am somewhat neurotic about losing unsaved work because of application crashes, I hit cmd-S to save my document very often. I reopened the document and started writing.

I created a blank document based on the template a couple of days ago and jotted down a few notes. Today, I was working on my next “Apple Peel” column, typing it in Word X using a template that I have defined for such purposes. I have had the opportunity to discuss this bug before.
