I am having problems with Word 2011 crashing on my iMac (OSX 10.7.5).

This may manifest as: 1) sections of text turning into question marks (as if you are trying to download text in a font you don't have) 2) your active window going blank; or 3) a blank dialog box popping up. Sometimes these spontaneously resolve, or partially resolve. Sometimes these occurrences are related to cutting and pasting or saving, but on one occasion I wasn't touching the keyboard at all.

Recently, I've notice that the text within the Word window will go blank when it is active, return when a different window (e.g. Safari) is open, then go blank again when I click back on the Word window.

Most frustratingly, the file will not save when it is in this state.

Despite reinstalling Office 2011 and installing all updates, including a firmware update, there are still random crashes that occur. As per some suggestions on the web, I've repaired a long list of disk permissions. Disk verification came out clean.

A coworker suggested that having Excel open at the same time was the problem, but closing Excel did not help.

This is definitely not a memory issue. I've restarted my computer multiple times, and closed all other windows, and have more than 90% of my hard drive still free.

Any help would be welcome!

Best,
Sarah

Hi Sarah,

It's quite possibly a hardware issue (including memory). Your hard drive is storage, not memory. And either could be faulty. It may also be an operating system fault. Equally, if the problem started after you installed some other software, it could be a conflict with that.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

I have the same problem. It only occurs when working on large documents. Some of the authors of the document use PCs, so some editing may have occurred in a different version of Word. The smallest file on which it has occurred is 40 pages, 11MB containing lots of Track Changes editing and many illustrations. The problem occurs if the file is saved on the internal HD or an external HD. It seems to me that the problem must be with Word because it has occurred on 3 different MBPs (including a retina display). On each machine Word has been reinstalled (on more than one occasion) and is routinely updated. The only solution is to turn off the computer. All editing that has occurred since the last Save is lost. I now manually save the file about every 2-3 minutes and save it as a different name about every 15 minutes. That's obviously not efficient from the perspective of HDD space (one day I ended up with over 30 versions of a document that was almost 20 MB) but it's better than losing a lot of editing. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

The problem remains as described above, except it now occurs on much shorter (10 page) documents with only 1500 words. Any suggestions?