MS Word Should Be Shot and Dragged Behind a Horse

Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
My partner in Vancouver is having an awful time with word and excel documents. Also, we're both having word stability issues.



Vancouver: G4 400Mhz Tower, 700+ ram, 10.3.3, Office X (Word 10.1.4, Excel 10.1.5)



Calgary: G4 400Mhz TiPB, 350+ ram, 10.3.3, Office X (Word 10.1.4, Excel 10.1.5)



#1 WORD NOT SAVING



We have a word doc template to send in reports and another excel document for a different report. In both cases, my partner finds the last document we created (ie the June 15 report named june15.doc) and duplicates the file. He then renames the file (ie June21.doc) and then opens it. He modifies the report information, saves it and then emails it over.



We've noticed that the changes aren't being saved. We're finding that the file was if fact duplicated and the file's name has been changed, but the information in the word document is old (it's the June 15 report, not the June 21 report he entered and saved.)



So far, I've recommended hard saving (using SAVE AS, not save,) repairing the permissions and trashing the preferences. Nothing has helped.



#2 WORD STABILITY



In Calgary (and Vancouver) we've had serious problems with word stability. The program is relatively stable, except when we're using a table in the word document (and almost all our reports use tables.) The table is about 4-6 pages long, 4 columns across. If we added more than 6 sentences, word suddenly crashes and we lose everything. We're forced to save after almost every sentence. On a plain word document, we've never had any issues.



We've tried repairing the permissions and trashing the com.microsoft.word.plist preferences, but nothing has helped.



Can anyone help us out?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 3
    whisperwhisper Posts: 735member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by interact

    Can anyone help us out?



    Microsoft could help you out. But no doubt they'd rather have you send them another $400 to get Word 2005, which almost-but-not-quite fixes that particular bug and adds 53 more handy-dandy features that nobody will ever use.
  • Reply 2 of 3
    dmband0026dmband0026 Posts: 2,345member
    I can't help you, but for the record. I agree.
  • Reply 3 of 3
    toweltowel Posts: 1,479member
    I agree that Office is simply not fit for serious work. My personal pet peeve, besides all the automatic crap you have to turn off, is Excel's 65536 column limit. Oh, and apparent inability to turn formula results into hard numbers. Those bug the heck out of me.



    For the first problem, I couldn't replicate it using simple files. Do you have the same problem, or just your partner? He might need to just make sure that he's opening and editing the right document (the old one might pop to the front by accident?). If it really is a bug, have you tried making the duplicate by "Saving As" June15 to June21, then making the changes and "Save"ing?



    For the second problem, do you really need to be using Word? For such a large table, you're almost certainly better off using a database or even spreadsheet program. You can format Excel so it looks pretty; and if looks don't matter just use a database, or even plain-old tab-delimited text.
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