Unofficial Word Stuff

Book

Suggestions

Home Page

Bloglines

1906
CelebrateStadium
2006

OfficeZealot

Scobleizer

TechRepublic

AskWoody

SpyJournal

Saturday, February 23, 2008 – Permalink –
Troubleshoot
Problem solvers

If you have trouble opening a Word document, or it is not working well, try these suggestions:

FIRST
Delete all of Word's temp files.

Go to Edit>Replace
Make sure to include all of your local drives in the search and that "include subfolders" is checked.
Search for:
*.tmp
Then delete all these temp files.

Word leaves shards of temp files wherever the document file was stored. Word's temp files start with a tilde (~), so in most cases you can delete:
~*.*

SECOND

Use Edit>Find to locate Normal.DOT.
Rename it (Normal.OLD) or delete it. Word will create a new copy when it restarts.

The only caveat here is be careful that you don't have important macros stored in Normal.DOT. If you rename, you can recover them.

THIRD

If that does not correct the problem, try this next step:

Go to Start>Run and type:
winword.exe /a
(Note that there is a space before the /a)
Then press ENTER. This starts Word without any add-ins, global templates, or Normal.DOT.
Look in Tools>Templates and Add-ins to see if there are any files that can be un-checked.

If you need even more help, go to:

The Word MVP site

Knowledge base:
How to troubleshoot problems that occur when you start Word or when you work in Word

How to troubleshoot problems that occur when you start or use Word 2007, Word 2003, or Word 2002

[Edited entry from 12/11/2004]

See all Topics
word
Labels: General, Tips

<Doug Klippert@ 7:19 AM

Comments: Post a Comment