After Word crash, can no longer save as .docx

[mrwednesday]

Hi guys, just found these forums and I'm hoping someone can help me.

I've been using MS Word 2010 for work and just today was working on a document that crashed Word while I was in the middle of putting it together. I ended up having to stop the process through task manager, re-open Word, and recover the files.



I then attempted to save the recovered file as a .docx and Word then started getting weird. I would choose to save it as a .docx and instead of doing so, the program simply opened up the Save As... dialog box again. I attempted it again and the same thing happened. It looked like it was stuck in an endless loop of some kind.

So I decided to save it as a .doc (Word 97-2003) format and it saved just fine. I then converted it back to Word 2010 and attempted to save it and it did the same thing again.

So I abandoned that document completely and just opened a new document in word, typed a few characters, and attempted to save it as a Word 2010 document. Same behavior.

I am attempting to Repair office at this point through Windows, but I am wondering, is this something wrong with what I'm doing, or has Word itself become corrupted or broken? I need help fast!

[mrwednesday]

After repairing Office, I am still having the same problem with this document AND the content from the document (when I try to copy it to a new document and save it as .docx). I am no longer having the problem saving any kind of .docx. The problem seems to be isolated to this document only.

[macropod]

hi mrwednesday,

That suggests some serious corruption in the affected document. A simple way of fixing such corruption that usually works is:
• go to the end of the document and press Enter to insert a new paragraph
• copy & paste everything except that new last paragraph into a new document
• do the same two steps with your page headers/footers if they don't copy across
• close the old document and save the new one over it.

[swcoop]

Thought I'd post a note for future folks with this problem: I had to copy and paste parts of the problem document into a new document and save... if it worked I tried another area. I finally narrowed it down to a table cell that had a bullet list and three different fonts. The tip off was I selected the table and changed to a single font, but the font window was still blank as if there were multiple fonts. I deleted that cell and the document saved.

[macropod]

Hi scwoop,

Glad you got it sorted.

FWIW, documents with corrupt tables can often be repaired by converting the tables to text and back again or by saving the document in RTF format, closing the document then re-opening it and re-saving in the doc(x) format.