corrupt word doc fix (summary)

Subject: corrupt word doc fix (summary)
From: "Carol Chung" <cychung55 -at- hotmail -dot- com>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Wed, 19 Sep 2001 16:26:05 -0700

Thanks for all the responses. It reminds me that tech writers tend to be quick to help w/ info.

In short, multiple people suggested copying the corrupted file contents (except for the last paragraph symbol) into a new file.

There were a couple URL's recommended for further reference:

http://mvps.org/word/FAQs/AppErrors/CorruptDoc.htm
http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q87/8/56.asp?LN=EN-US&SD=GN

-Carol Chung
(all responses below)
---

"Iannone, Shauna K. [VIS-Non J&J]" <SIANNON -at- VISUS -dot- JNJ -dot- com>

I had that problem before. Depending on how you selected the contents to paste, you may have accidentally copied the corrupted bit, too. First, instead of doing a Select All, try manually selecting the whole thing and pasting it, and see if that works (you may have to re-do some formatting, which is a pain, but it's better than retyping). If that doesn't work, try to locate what's corrupted, and not select that when you try copying it all again. I've found more than half the time the corrupted bit is an embedded object, especially any Excel charts. If you change Views of the doc (from Page Layout to Normal or vice-versa), it sometimes gives you a clue (in my case, I noticed little boxes to the left of the margin in Normal view that shouldn't have been there). If you can't easily identify the corrupted section, you can do the tedious-but-mthodical route: go and create a new doc, and copy-and-paste a section at a time, saving between every paste (preferably alternating among 2 or 3 different filenames at each save, so if you "find" the bit by pasting it into the doc, you can go back to the last uncorrupted one you saved to skip the section and continue the process through the rest of the doc).

Not a happy prospect, but it helped a couple times before when I've encountered that error. There were a couple times I couldn't isolate the corrupted bit and lost the doc anyway -- I suspect in those cases the corruption was in a part of the file I couldn't get to, to avoid.

Good Luck!
Shauna

---

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"Newman, Sarah" <snewman -at- bechtel -dot- com>

Carol,

The Word MVP site has an article on fixing corrupt documents. Try the
suggestions in http://mvps.org/word/FAQs/AppErrors/CorruptDoc.htm,

Sarah Newman
BECHTEL CORPORATION
Information Systems and Technology
713-235-3352
281-240-9111

---

First off, make sure you don't copy the final paragraph marker when you copy
and paste. File corruption often lies concealed in that unlikely place.
Second, there are more possible causes of corruption than you can possibly
imagine; fortunately, Microsoft reluctantly admitted this. You can find
their suggestions at
http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q87/8/56.asp?LN=EN-US&SD=GN

--Geoff Hart, FERIC, Pointe-Claire, Quebec
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca

---

Susie Pearson <spearson -at- espial -dot- com>
You could try sending it to a computer that doesn't have virus detection, or
you could disable your own computer's virus detection. I had that problem a
long time ago with a document, and it seemed different ppl could open the
document depending on what version of Dr. Norton's they were running. Just
a thought (of course, if you think it is infected, don't disable your virus
detection software).

Susie Pearson

---
"Dugas, Andrew" <ADugas -at- eTranslate -dot- com>

You could:

- Save it as a text file, then reopen it in Word. Of course, you'll to
reapply all the formatting and whatever other fancy stuff you might have.

- Save it as an RTF file, close it, then reopen it in Word, save as a .doc
and see if that takes care of it.

- Save as RTF, open in Frame, save as a Frame .fm file, save as an RTF,
reopen in Word, resave as a .doc, and see if that takes care of it.

These are all the things I would try.

Good luck,

Andy

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"Mark Moloney" <mmoloney -at- network365 -dot- com>

I hope somebody else will have told you, but there is one trick that works
90% of the time:

Open the doc and highlight everything *except* the last paragraph mark. Copy
all of that and paste it into a new document.

It usually works.

_______________
Mark Moloney
NETWORK365
Technical Writer

Tel +353-1-276-4538 (direct)
Tel +353-1-276 4500 (reception)
Fax +353-1-276 4533
www.network365.com

---

Keith Cronin <kcronin -at- daleen -dot- com>

Carol-

How big is the document in question? Does it have much special formatting such as numbers, bullets, etc.? Does it have many graphics?

Let me know, and I'll tell you whether I have efficient workarounds. Good luck!

Keith Cronin
Senior Proposal Coordinator
Daleen Technologies
1750 Clint Moore Road
Boca Raton, FL 33487
(561) 981-2312

---


Portia Westfall <portia -at- lenel -dot- com>

Carol,
Make sure that when you paste everything into the new document, you copied
everything except the last paragraph marker.

Also, if you have the track changes on, accept all the changes. Sometimes
this gets rid of the corruption in our documents.

Sincerely,
Portia


---

Carol,

For some reason, Word stores a lot of the document information in the last
paragraph marker of the document. When I've had corrupt files, I've often
successfully resolved the problems by copying all the text EXCEPT the last
paragraph marker into a new document. I then reformat the last paragraph
accordingly.

Sometimes, however, this hasn't resolved the problem. In this case, the
corruption may lie elsewhere in the document. In this case, try cutting and
pasting the text of the corrupt document into a new document one paragraph
at a time. Between each paragraph, save, close, and reopen the new
document. Continue to do this until you receive the corrupt document
message. At that point, you've identified a corrupted paragraph (there may
be more than one). You can then cut and paste up to the corrupt paragraph,
manually enter the text of the corrupt paragraph, and continue the process
from that point on until you've gone through the entire document. It's time
consuming, but less time consuming than retyping the whole document by hand.

Hope that helps.

Kent Newton
Supervisor, Documentation Services
Catalyst International, Inc.
Tel: 414.362.6836
Email: knewton -at- mke -dot- catalystwms -dot- com

---

"Scott Wilborne" <wilbornes -at- vtls -dot- com>

We've encountered this problem too, but I don't know of an easy solution.
Have you tried pasting individual chapters into a new document? Sometimes it
seems that the corruption is in just one part of the document, often near a
bunch of tables. If this does not work, you may have to retype the entire
thing or generate the text some other way. Actually, you might want to try
converting to HTML and then pasting it back into Word. Also, you might try
pasting the text into another word processor.

Hope this helps some. By the way, if someone gives you a fix for this, could
you forward it to me too? This problem periodically pops up for one of our
writers.

Good Luck!

Scott

---

KMcLauchlan -at- chrysalis-its -dot- com

Here's another thought you could pursue:

Apparently, the makers of Word assumed that when
writing documents, you would not ever make more
than 1500 transitions between numbered and bulleted
items/conditions, in a single doc.

A much-used, much-revised working document in our
department was recently giving "may be corrupt"
messages and a helpful IT wonk found a reference
on the Microsoft web site. The problem file, by
the way, had nearly 2200 of the offending transitions.
Go figure.

Anyway, the following is a paraphrase of
the Microsoft page. This will not help much if you
have REAL corruption. It will help if you have bogus
"corrupted" messages... in Windoze. (We mostly use NT, here.)

***Begin***
A change to registry is needed to accept a larger range of switches between numbering and bullets.

Here's the change needed:
· Run "Regedit"
· Select the following key in the Windows registry: "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\9.0\Word\Options

· On the Edit menu, click New, click DWord Value, and then add the following registry value:
o Value Name: LTOverflowRecovery
o Value: 1
· On the Registry menu, click Exit.

And voilà! Your document is fixed and no more annoying messages.

***End***

/kevin

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