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Old 09-21-2007, 12:40 PM
LdeMarais LdeMarais is offline
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Join Date: Sep 2007
Posts: 4
LdeMarais
Default Word doc crashes, but ok if Pdf

Displaying a pdf file on a computer is completely different than bringing up a doc file in Word. (Completely different format, way of displaying, and memory requirements. )

Over time Word files have a lot of extraneous formatting, style, and editing commands embedded in them. This takes up disk space (file size) and memory, and could be the cause of the crash. I've had this happen with hardware manuals that have a lot of photographs in them. As a user you cannot see this data.
To clean up this extraneous data, do a File, Save As and save it on another drive or give it a different name. This often decreases the file size too. It is good practice to do this periodically for large Word files and files that have a long history of edits or conversions. Another way to clean up this data is to save it as an rtf, then open the rtf file and save it as a doc.

I know this doesn't help if the Word file crashes every time you open it. There isn't much you can do with it. Hopefully you have a backup or an earlier version of the file. If you have Always Create Backup Copy checked under Tools, Options, Save tab you should have a backup file on your computer (usually the same folder the original file is). If you are working in a configuration management environment you may be able to go back to a prior version.

I don't have any definite answers, just suggestions, some of which you may have already tried.

Try opening the file with no other applications open.
Try opening the file on another PC, preferably with more memory.
Try opening the file with another application. For example, a conversion tool.

Have you tried Word's Autorecover? To see what folder your Autorecover files are: Tools, Options, File Locations.

It sounds like you have a good pdf version of the file. There are tools that convert pdf to Word doc. However, they have their limitations and additional work that needs to be done once the file is converted back to a doc file. If it is a really long document, it is worth it. If it isn't that big it is probably best to rekey it or try an OCR scan conversion of the most recent hard copy and clean up the letters and symbols that were not recognized by OCR.

Hope this helps.
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