Desperately needed advice on Word 2011

I'm a writer working under deadline on a final manuscipt submission and Word has gone weird. It abruptly either crashes ("Word has encountered a problem and is shutting down") or stops responding, which is much worse because then I lose the file I had been working on. I have auto recovery set for 5 minutes, but as far as I can tell, it isn't working. When I look for the file after I shut down following a non-responding incident, none exists. I'm supposedly saving my auto-recovery files in Documents but I've also checked the Application Support section in Library. If Word actually is saving auto-recovery files, I don'k know where they are going. Phrases, words and letters also are being dropped or changed in my document.

I changed my normal.dotm to meet the publisher's requirements for fonts and other formatting options but I'm note sure my changes have set. When I'm working in a document using a customized Style, exit Word, and restart Styles has not been saved.

I'm using Word for Mac 2011 14.4.1 on an intel iMac running Mavericks. I've shut down AutoCorrect and TextExpander. The only other program running in the background is Default Folder.

My first inclination is to uninstall/reinstall Word but I'm afraid if I do that I will lose the formatting options( like Styles) that i have customized. I'm also inclined to remove normal.dotm and start fresh, but everyone knows that is not a simple procedure in Word for Mac although it should be.

I would appreciate any and all advice because these problems are severely hampering my ability to get my project finished in time. It is not unusual for Word to stop responding every couple of hours or so.

Thanks in advance.

Many thanks, campguy. Both Excel and PP opened so I moved on to the link on how to incrementally reset Word. That looks more practical thank trying to reinstall Office.