Word 2007 has convinced me I'm being personally targeted . . .

PGK · Apr 10, 2010

OK, so this is driving me insane because it is insane.

I've noticed that when I go through and edit my MS and then save it, Word will only save some changes but not all. So next time I open up the MS and read through it I find several problems I know I corrected but weren't saved.

Let me give you an example.

Let's say I originally wrote this 2 days ago:

Peter want for a long walk. Peter was shut in the face. Peter dead. Petre became a ghost.

I've put the mistakes in bold.

So then the next day I open up the doc and read through fixing mistakes.
So it looks like this:

Peter went for a long walk. Peter was shot in the face. Peter died. Peter became a ghost.

I press Ctrl+S to save it and close the doc.

So then the next day I open it up again and it looks like this:

Peter want for a long walk. Peter was shot in the face. Peter dead. Peter became a ghost.

So it saved some of the corrections, but not all.

At first I thought maybe it's just me and I neglected to fix some of the mistakes when I thought I had. So I tested it just now and it's not me. I wrote something and made some purposeful mistakes, saved the document, closed it, then reopened it and edited. I pressed Ctrl+S after each correction and then double checked and triple checked before saving one last time and closing it down again. I then reopened it and once again some mistakes had reverted to the original while others showed up as corrected.

And what's worse is that each time the mistakes saved or ignored are randomly picked. I have auto-correct turned off, but even with it on it shouldn't be re-correcting black to blacj.

No wonder I've been editing and re-editing the same things over and over again wondering if I'm going nuts.

Any insight? Please!?!

leahzero · Apr 11, 2010

No insight, but what is incredibly weird is that after I read this post earlier today, I did some revisions to my MS in Word 2010 (beta), saved, printed, and noticed that some of the revisions were missing, too.

I've never noticed this before. Maybe it was just user error?

kurzon · Apr 11, 2010

Sounds vaguely virus-like. Certainly not an error I've encountered before (outside user error).

I would suggest editing the documents with WordPad or a text editor for a couple of days to see if you still get these reversions.

Caitlin Black · Apr 11, 2010

Yeah, I've never come across this, and I use Word '07.

Manuel Royal · Apr 11, 2010

Stupid question: Is it possible that when you re-open the file, somehow you're getting an autosaved version, created while you were partway through the revision process, and not the finished version you manually saved?

PGK · Apr 11, 2010

I'll admit I stopped being Tech-savvy a long time ago. To me Tweeting is what birds do, and blogging is reminiscent of walking through a bog.

Anyway,

Sounds vaguely virus-like

Great, so all that money I spent on McAfee internet security was for nothing. At least Spybot was free.

I would suggest editing the documents with WordPad or a text editor for a couple of days to see if you still get these reversions.

After I read this I thought about copying the text to Text Document (I think that's wordpad, right?) and after saving it copying it back to Word. It seems that word isn't making any changes to anything changed with the text document, so perhaps an easy solution would be to copy/paste everything new there and then back into word before saving and quitting. Though I'd still like to have Word functioning properly.

Stupid question: Is it possible that when you re-open the file, somehow you're getting an autosaved version, created while you were partway through the revision process, and not the finished version you manually saved?

I have no idea. All I know is that I press Ctrl+S before exiting Word and all my words are there again when I reopen it (except for some of the revisions which sometimes revert back to the original wording).
Why would autosave override my final manual save?

jairey · Apr 11, 2010

A couple of ideas: What happens if you make changes and do a file>saveas and rename the file? Does the new file have the changes saved correctly?

If you make changes and try to close the document without saving them, does WORD ask you if you want to save the changed document? (That might show if it's recognizing that changes were actually made). If it does, and you tell it you want to save, does it keep the changes?

googling around: There seem to have been some issues with interactions with other programs creating macros that caused problems. One suggestion is to force a creation of a brand new normal.dot file. If you search on the MS site there are instructions on how to do this for 2007.

Good luck

ejket · Apr 11, 2010

Just curious, are you using .docx rather than .doc? If you are, I'd go back to .doc. Even MS doesn't know how MSOOXML works.

Matera the Mad · Apr 11, 2010

PGK said:
Great, so all that money I spent on McAfee internet security was for nothing. At least Spybot was free.

Yes, any money spent on McCrapee is for nothing. And Spybot is not anti-virus, so there's no comparison.

I would second jairey's suggestions.

CheekyWench · Apr 11, 2010

This stuff happens to me all. the. time.
I spent 2 hours revising little squiggly lines on my 1st WIP. SAVED. I mean, like, File, save, click.. watch the little bar zip across the screen SAVED it. Next time I opened it - little squiggly lines came back. :rant:

Trill · Apr 12, 2010

Does anyone else have access to your computer?

For April Fool's Day, we changed the auto-correct on our supervisor's computer to auto-correct things into typos. We also unplugged its ethernet cable so he didn't send anything out before we switched it back. It was funny, but that was because we knew he'd laugh about it.

Alternatively, you've made the same typo multiple times so now Word has it in its delusional little head that it's the correct spelling.

Try using Save As and saving a copy of it rather than just saving it to your original document.

Another option is trying Avast (free) anti-virus. I just spent a couple of hours cleaning out my roommate's computer, she had McAfee and when I used Avast it found an additional 10 viruses.

PGK · Apr 13, 2010

See, that's just show's you how little I know about this stuff. I think I'll wait until McAfee's license is done and then I'll look into another internet security program.

I wish it was as simple as making the same mistake/typo all the time. In my WIP I used the word "pernicious" only once (and I've never used it before on this laptop with this copy of Word). I accidentally added the "s" before the "u" on the first draft. Corrected during edit and saved. I was doing a read-through today and there was that little "s" before the "u" again. Since I'm so close to being completely done with this WIP I think I'll just save it as normal, but keep it open (never close it or the laptop down). If I need send copies to anyone I'll just print from the open file I know is still fixed.

No, I'm not the only one with access to the laptop, but I also know my wife wouldn't do that to me.

Thanks anyway.

ComicBent · Apr 13, 2010

Just a guess ...

I still use Word 2003, so I had to do some googling and searching just to find out some things about Word 2007.

My suspicion: This has something to do with "versions" of a document. Somehow you may be getting some saved version instead of a final version.

Try looking at everything about "versions" and the Document Inspector. You might want to make sure that "Track Changes" is turned off.

Wish I could help more, but I cannot with the program.

kaitie · Apr 13, 2010

The track changes is what occurred to me as well. It's possible that it's set to show original or something of that sort so the changes are actually there, but not showing. That's incredibly strange, however. I've never come across anything even remotely like that.

ChristineR · Apr 14, 2010

It does sound like your file is being partly saved. I have no insight other than that, except that it does not sound at all virus-like to me. It would be very weird for someone to write a virus that went into Word, found your changes (probably with some abuse of "track changes,") and randomly changed some of them back. Viruses tend to change your passwords and send loads of spam e-mail. Joke viruses are largely a thing of the past, and when they still exist, they tend not to do really complicated and subtle stuff like you're describing. A bug in Word is far more likely.

Try running "Hijack this!" It will almost certainly find anything that doesn't belong, even though it won't give you much insight into what it might be. Then you can report it to McAfee, who will eventually fix it and tell you how to clean it. Personally, I wouldn't bother, because the likelihood of it being a virus is small.

To me, it sounds very, very bug-like. Why? Well, Word doesn't save what it shows you on the screen. It saves bits and pieces, notes and changes, formats and words, stuff like that. When you actually exit Word, that's when it slams everything together and tries to make it as simple as possible. Try changing, saving, exiting, changing, saving, exiting, and see if you can get the save effect--a random selection of changes from previous exits. I bet it won't happen--if you get any weird effects, it will all be from the last exit.

PGK · Apr 14, 2010

This great. I did have "track changes" turned on. I turned it off and so far the problem is gone. Granted I only tested it a couple of times and not on my WIP (just a test paragraph) but so far it's keeping all the changes. If this continues I'll be very happy.

So would this make it a bug within Word or is it just me and not knowing how to properly handle the program?

RJK · Apr 14, 2010

I don't have a solution, but I may have a direction to look. While running Word 2007 with several docs open, and several of them edited and saved, I deleted all but the first 3 chapters of my 26 chapter WIP. When I tried to do a Save-as, I got a message stating Word was all out of memory. Word saved the 3 chapters as a "Rescued.doc".

I could only guess that word was holding all the edits in all the open docs + all the edits in the deleted portion of my WIP + all the text I'd deleted in virtual memory.

At least in this case, Word recognized it didn't have enough memory to complete the Save-as task.

What I'm wondering is, did you have a bunch of changes to one or more open Word docs, when the save error happened?

PGK · Apr 14, 2010

I did. I usually have plenty of open docs with notes, ideas, scenes for cannibalizing etc. This last one especially was for a rewrite so I had the new one, the old one, and all my other usual docs open. Maybe that plus the "track changes" added up to a mass confusion for Word it just couldn't handle.

JimmyB27 · Apr 14, 2010

One day, people will cotton on to the fact that Microsoft make rubbish software.

Tracy · Apr 15, 2010

My better half is a computer nerd, so I'll ask him when he gets back, and see what he suggests. usually his suggestions involve deleting anything Microsoft

and using free software such as Opensoft (I think that's it, will check).

He swears by AVG as the best free anti-virus software - no need to look elsewhere he says. (I think I've done the link right - if not, just do a search for it).

JimmyB27 · Apr 15, 2010

Tracy said:
. usually his suggestions involve deleting anything Microsoft and using free software such as Opensoft (I think that's it, will check).

Open Office, perhaps? I'm pretty much alone I think, but I hate that too - at least it's free though. :tongue

Jamesaritchie · Apr 15, 2010

These are weird problems. Not ones I've had with Word 2007, and not ones I've heard about anywhere. I'm not sure what's going on, but I doubt it's Word's fault.

ResearchGuy · Apr 15, 2010

PGK said:
... So would this make it a bug within Word or is it just me and not knowing how to properly handle the program?

It's you.

Track changes is very useful, but only if you know what it is, how it works, and why you are using it. I've used it occasionally when working on a file for a client, and he needed to see/ok changes. For my own use, no way.

I've been using Word for about 16 years, with very few problems, and none in the 2007 version. (None that I can recall in the 2003 version, for that matter. None, actually, that I can specifically recall ever, other than learning curve for the tricky bits.)

--Ken

InsanitySquares · Apr 17, 2010

How very odd. I've got Word 2007, have had it since I've had this laptop (September 08) and use it extensively for schoolwork as well as writing. Never had an error like that. All I can suggest is defragmenting your computer as a start (I can't remember how exactly to do it, a friend defragged for me last time) but it does clear space on your drive. If the error's to do with memory, it should help. If not, it still sorts out your computer a bit better.

Word 2007 has convinced me I'm being personally targeted . . .

They put those words in my head!

The colors! THE COLORS!

Wild one

They put those words in my head!

Noobus Perpetuus

Bartender, gimme a Linux Mint

O.o

They put those words in my head!

With great power comes

What happened?

They put those words in my head!

Sheriff Bullwinkle the Poet says:

They put those words in my head!

Hoopy frood

Hoopy frood

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