[RedAndrew]

Lately I have encountered errors that make me believe I am working with
corrupt word 2003 doc files.

After reading various online help pages (see below) covering topics such as
manually reparing the files, using various "Save as" features, and searching
for a free doc fixing tools (of which I found none), I decided to try Word's
Open and Repair, even though I could find nothing describing exactly WHAT it
repairs!
http://www.word.mvps.org/FAQs/AppErrors/CorruptDoc.htm
http://www.word.mvps.org/FAQs/Genera...MasterDocs.htm
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/8936...d=2530&sid=106

Prior to using the "Open and Repair" on the file, I was seeing long save
times of +90 seconds and even complete hangs of Word - not ideal when working
to timescales. The "repair" listed that it fixed 3 issues:
Numbered Styles 1
Sections and Headers 1
Sections and Headers 2

Since the "repair", I am now experiencing average save file times of +40
seconds on a document of roughly 80 pages, the bulk of this time appears to
be while word is repaginating. The document contains some images and has a
TOC but is less than 1meg in size. If I turn on the "Track Changes" option,
the save file time appears to increase to +60 seconds.

1. Can anyone tell me what "Open and Repair" does.
2. And are these "save file" times the best I can expect?

System Spec:
Dell Dimension 3100 (approx 1 year old)
XP Pro SP2
Pentium 4 3GHz Dual Core
1GB RAM
+ No other known/noticeable issues

[Cindy M.]

Hi Andrew,

Can't tell you exactly what the "Repair" feature does, but in a general way it
analyzes the hidden, binary structures of a document looking for things that
aren't correct. Numbering is one thing that can cause lots of problems, so are
section breaks, headings could be associated with the numbering.

Hard to say whether you can lower the time required to save the document - a 50%
reduction is already quite good! If you think repagination is a large part of
it, you can try working in the Normal view with Background repagination
(Tools/Options/General) turned off. Sometimes, it helps to lock fields that may
be updating (Ctrl+A, Ctrl+F11 to lock; Ctrl+Shift+F11 to unlock).

Of course, if the document is large and you've made a lot of edits, it's just
going to take that kind of time for Word to incorporate all the edits from the
scratch files it uses to keep track of your work (so that you can Undo later).
It might speed things up to clear the Undo buffer before saving:

Sub ClearMyUndoBuffer()
ActiveDocument.UndoClear
End Sub

Lately I have encountered errors that make me believe I am working with
corrupt word 2003 doc files.

After reading various online help pages (see below) covering topics such as
manually reparing the files, using various "Save as" features, and searching
for a free doc fixing tools (of which I found none), I decided to try Word's
Open and Repair, even though I could find nothing describing exactly WHAT it
repairs!
http://www.word.mvps.org/FAQs/AppErrors/CorruptDoc.htm
http://www.word.mvps.org/FAQs/Genera...MasterDocs.htm
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/8936...d=2530&sid=106

Prior to using the "Open and Repair" on the file, I was seeing long save
times of +90 seconds and even complete hangs of Word - not ideal when working
to timescales. The "repair" listed that it fixed 3 issues:
Numbered Styles 1
Sections and Headers 1
Sections and Headers 2

Since the "repair", I am now experiencing average save file times of +40
seconds on a document of roughly 80 pages, the bulk of this time appears to
be while word is repaginating. The document contains some images and has a
TOC but is less than 1meg in size. If I turn on the "Track Changes" option,
the save file time appears to increase to +60 seconds.

1. Can anyone tell me what "Open and Repair" does.
2. And are these "save file" times the best I can expect?

System Spec:
Dell Dimension 3100 (approx 1 year old)
XP Pro SP2
Pentium 4 3GHz Dual Core
1GB RAM
+ No other known/noticeable issues


Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 17 2005)
http://www.word.mvps.org

This reply is posted in the Newsgroup; please post any follow question or reply
in the newsgroup and not by e-mail :-)

[Alan]

Hi RedAndrew,

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DataNumen, Inc. - World leader in data recovery technologies
Website: http://www.datanumen.com
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