Hello,

First and foremost, I am working on a Mac using MS Word 2011. I've been working on a large project that contains many graphics and equations and such, and all was well until roughly 50 pages in.

I had been saving my document frequently as I worked and was not notified of any errors; however, as I had went to close out the document, I was prompted with the "Would you like to save changes..." I naively thought that I pressed a character or something so I selected no. When I later reloaded my document, everything I had done that day was gone. I couldn't make sense of what had happened because it appeared to be saving as normal. After finding the autorecovery files, the last one was from days prior to that, so that was of no help. I decided to view the document properties and the time for "last modified" was the day before. It wasn't saving anything!

I buckled down and redid and the work that was lost, and all was well; however, after another day of smooth sailing, the same thing began happening. The only solution was to copy all the content, quit word, reopen it and paste then save. This was inconvenient, but it worked. Sadly, short-lived this method was. Today I was working as usual and the document quit saving so I tried my copy and paste method and it didn't work. Word luckily somehow got a single recent autosave in, but I couldn't save its contents into a new document nor could I copy and paste as usual.

So after a little bit of experimentation with trying to copy and paste smaller chunks of the document, I finally got parts of it to save. But I still couldn't get the entire thing to. I kept doing this until I finally got it to save all the up to the last text-box I added, but not after that. So I removed the text-box to see if that had been the culprit, and it saved! I added it back and it wouldn't save.

The thing is, I have text-boxes all throughout my document. I of course hadn't noticed the problem when I first started adding them, but now that I think back, things may have started going wrong at about that same time. For whatever reason, it seems as if it finally gave out completely after adding these last two boxes.

Has anyone ever experienced or heard about something like this? I formed my hypothesis (that removing all text-boxes will solve the problem) based on this single observation, so it may be completely wrong or even that the text-boxes are just the symptom of a deeper issue.

Thank you,


Lagrange

Given that you've been editing, is there any reason for answering 'no' at the save prompt? As for the text boxes, they shouldn't be a problem - there's no particular limit on how many you can have - see: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/211489.

That said, it's possible the document has acquired some for of corruption. Corrupt documents can often be 'repaired' by inserting a new, empty, paragraph at the very end, copying everything except that new paragraph to a new document based on the same template (headers & footers may need to be copied separately), closing the old document and saving the new one over it. Similarly, 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

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