Problems with Word!

What version of Word/ Mac OS X are you running?

 

Next time that happens you could try copying and pasting the text to Text Edit. That way if it crashes you can just copy the text back...

 

Have you tried saving as anything other than a .doc?

 

The Tiger version does when you open a .doc file. Note sure about copy/paste though...

 

There is a longstanding issue with Mac Word that caused it to produce this type of error if the same open document had been saved too many times (nice, MS. ). I thought very strongly that this had been resolved at some point, but apparently this is not true. I've never personally run into it....

Here is a document with workarounds. Here is a Google Search that will get you a ton of stuff on this issue, and here is an article explaining some workarounds.

 

From what I understand, this really just has to do with the fact that you kept the file open for six weeks. OS X has no problem being booted for six weeks, but Word is apparently a different story. Just save and close it when you're done for the day, at least once in a while, and this should be an issue of the past. My thesis was more than 50% longer than yours, and it turned out fine.

 

I'm almost convinced MS make thier software faulty for macs so it makes OS X look bad, I'd recommend AbiWord, very simular interface and very stable.

 

I dunno... the Macs I did my thesis on were rebooted once every three or four weeks. I did close Word out when I wasn't using it, though. I've never run into this problem. Sorry... I'm not sure why you've had it. Maybe you should do the "Workaround #2" in the link I provided, just in case?

I've had very good luck with Word.X and 04, FWIW... and I'm part of the camp that likes Office 2004 better than Office 2003, and misses Mac features when I go to use Office on Windows. So...eh. Not the place for that flame war.

 

mkrishnan described the general problem. As always, you mileage may vary. I seem to recall similar problem going back to Word 98. One of the things that you must remember is that the app creates a new temporary file during each save. These files are automatically deleted when Word is shut down. Perhaps, it there is only a limited number of such files which can be created each session. If this is the case, then you will exceed the limit quickly if you save frequently. The workaround would be to remember to shut Word down whenever you take a break.