[Wes]

I have some documents that are opening extremely slow, though they are only a
few pages of text. I think some of the formatting has corrupted. Is there
any way to have Word step me through/over the corruptions (debug?) or display
a report pointing to the location of corrupt sections? I know Wordperfect's
WPLook utility lists the corruptions that have been repaired/removed. I'm
hoping that Word can provide me a bit more information.

Any ideas?

[Jay Freedman]

Wes wrote:
I have some documents that are opening extremely slow, though they
are only a few pages of text. I think some of the formatting has
corrupted. Is there any way to have Word step me through/over the
corruptions (debug?) or display a report pointing to the location of
corrupt sections? I know Wordperfect's WPLook utility lists the
corruptions that have been repaired/removed. I'm hoping that Word
can provide me a bit more information.

Any ideas?

This isn't something Word has ever offered. Tools such as "Open and Repair"
either fix the corruption or not, but they don't report what was fixed.
Largely this is because the Word file format (up to but not including Word
2007) is a binary format, unlike WordPerfect's text stream format; even if
the tool told you what was corrupted, it wouldn't usually make any sense or
be of any use except to a programmer with access to the program's internals.

Most often the corruption is in a section of the binary file that's
represented by the final paragraph mark in the document, or by the section
breaks if they're present. A recommended method for trying to fix corruption
is to copy everything except the final paragraph mark, and paste it into a
new blank document. Although you'll lose the headers/footers, nondefault
margins, and other document-wide formatting, that will often leave the
corruption behind. If there are multiple section breaks, do the same with
each section and don't include the section breaks in the copy.

Sometimes it works to copy half of the original document and paste it into
one new blank document, then copy the other half to another document. If the
corruption tags along into one of the new documents, repeat the
half-and-half on that one; eventually you may narrow down the location to a
particular place -- often a table or something that was originally pasted
from a web page.

See http://www.word.mvps.org/FAQs/AppErrors/CorruptDoc.htm for more
discussion.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.