Word: "The operation is canceled."

[Makosuke]

Well this is great. I was working with a large (~4.5MB, ~160 page) Word .docx for work with a moderate amount of track changes and some comments. I've had experience with Word getting crashy with big docs, especially with a lot of tracked changes, but I felt like it's gotten better recently.

Well, now I've gotten the most marvelously unhelpful--and presumably British-spelled--error:

"The operation is canceled."

That's it.

I got this by opening a .docx created on Windows, doing some very minor work on it, saving it, and closing it.

Came back later in the day, tried to open it, got that error. I had done nothing between then and the last time I successfully opened it. What's really got me confused is that right after editing, I uploaded to a cloud share, then (I'm nearly certain) opened the local copy to make sure I uploaded the right thing, and it opened fine. When I tried re-downloading it, that wouldn't open either.

Tried deleting the entire Word Container folder in ~Library, no luck. I tried on a different Mac... same error. Try to open with "Repair" selected, still the same error.

Google Docs can open it mostly fine. Pages can also import it mostly fine. I say mostly because there are a few complex diagrams in it that don't import properly, but even Word was having trouble displaying some of them properly, and all of them are messed up, not just one, so I can't say for sure they're related.

Even Word on Windows, apparently, can open it fine, because my co-worker didn't say anything about the document being hosed.

So Word clearly corrupted the file on the last save (which is bad enough), but I'm nearly certain that I opened it to check after uploading and it worked, and it's additionally bizarre because this isn't the error you should get from a corrupt document. I even tested--I opened the doc in a raw editor, deleted a random chunk of the XML file that for the main document content, and tried to open it, and Word immediately threw a "Word experienced an error trying to open the file." error, with useful suggestions about recovery.

I could find a couple of instances of people asking about this problem--all of them relatively recent--but no successful suggestions for recovery.

I'm not really expecting help, this is more of a "if you get that error, you're screwed" post, since I've tried everything within reason and nothing works.

 

[tyc0746]

I've seen similar in Excel and Powerpoint, where you can check it immediately after finishing your edits and it's all fine. You check it 10 minutes later, still fine. Check it an hour later and it's gotten corrupt (and the accessed/modification time/date is unchanged).

I regularly work on much bigger Word documents, and whilst they become quite slow to open/save with tracked changes (and sometimes assign the changes to the wrong person/colour) we've only temporarily lost something when someone has been working in an offline copy (due to their internet connection going down).

We found an issue a while ago with inconsistent OneDrive caches, so turned that off, but that was more about changes on one machine not replicating to the cloud-version, so it resulted in lots of conflicts that Word could not process (this is 20 people working on a 450 page document).

On the PC, Office is now fine. On the Mac I don't even trust it with autosave, and it's slower than the Windows version. So where I have the option I prefer use Office in W10.

Does your cloud share not do versioning, or does your broken copy have a version history shown in the title-bar drop-down?

(greyed out in this instance as this is a local file, not on OneDrive/Sharepoint)


...and 'canceLed' is American English. British English is 'canceLLed' - which is strange when you consider 'canceLLation' is spelt the same in both dialects.

 

[Makosuke]

A big thank-you for the suggestions and experiences.

I realize that I threw a confusing red herring in there when I mentioned the cloud sync. That was not related to the document corruption--I am not using OneDrive or any of MS's cloud services at all, and I'm not using any other sort of synchronization service with this file. The file is stored in an unmolested local folder.

The cloud upload I mentioned was a manual drag-and-drop to Google Drive in a browser window, and likewise for the re-download, so could not have affected the file integrity.

...and 'canceLed' is American English. British English is 'canceLLed' - which is strange when you consider 'canceLLation' is spelt the same in both dialects.

Interesting digression. Reading up on it neither is technically standard for either region, but Americans have used one L more than two since around 1990, and it's accelerated recently.

I made the wrong assumption because I'm American and have always used two Ls, so it looked wrong to me. Now that I review, of the email I regularly get that uses the word, the (US) university I work at, all of my co-workers, and Ebay all use "cancelled", so I'm much more used to seeing that.

Google Calendar notifications are the only emails I get that use one L, and they're amusingly inconsistent; the subject line uses "canceled", while the fine print uses "cancellations".

 

[tyc0746]

We see the regional variations all the time as the docs we work on go to any of about 100 different colleagues in 50 countries...and almost every one of them changes the default language to their own preference.

I tend to get it towards the end of the process to make it all look nice...and we don’t mind whether it’s US English, British English or International English...as long as we ensure it’s consistent 🤔

 

[Makosuke]

Did some additional experimentation and remain thoroughly confused: It opens fine in Word on Win10, which is weird enough to start with. So I tried re-saving it in Windows and then opening that document on a Mac, figuring since the original Win-created document worked that would fix whatever my Mac Word corrupted.

Nope, still doesn't open on a Mac, same error.

If, however, I turn off Compatibility Mode on Windows and save it, I can again open it (it's also 50% bigger on disk, which surprised me).

I guess that means whatever my copy of Word did it's not technically wrong, so Word Win doesn't mind, but the Mac version chokes when trying to render it, and it's not present in compatibility mode. Which is still weird, because I made like 4 minor edits and a single comment.

 

[Nermal]

I don't know whether this is still the case with modern versions of Word, but in the past you had to do a Save As to ensure that it was fully saved. Just doing a Save would 'patch' the file with changes to make it save more quickly.