Tags from Word documents disappearing

[desertman]

I looked today at the MacBook Air (macOS 10.4.4) of a woman who uses Finder tags to organize her Word 2011 documents (Office 2011 is still working fine on her computer and she does not need anything better). She complained that these tags would disappear on their own whenever she would edit a tagged Word document - and she could demonstrate this to me. The Finder tags do indeed disappear whenever a Word document gets edited.

Can somebody explain how this is possible and how this can be prevented? That would be great. Thanks.

 

[NoBoMac]

Disappearing tags from Office documents seems to have been a thing for a few years now. And no-one can seem to figure out why. People with the issue say only Office documents seem to run into the issue, everything else is ok. Which I can see if "new" Office formats (xlsx, docx, pptx), since those are zip files containing a directory structure of data. Maybe Office is creating a whole new "zip" file and not transferring the tag information from the original. Can probably get an idea by having Finder open and visible on the screen and see if there is a temporary file created when "Save" it hit.

Some have success by uninstalling and reinstalling. Others by upgrading. And others, no joy after all that.

Since Office 2011 is no longer supported pre-Mojave, all bets are off.

And if saving document to something like Google Drive, then could be losing the tags via that as tags are stored within the filesystem table's slot for the file (aka the file header information), and some of these services do not copy the information. Believe Dropbox does retain the tags, on the other hand.

 

[desertman]

Thanks! Good to know that this and that might or might not help.