How MS Word documents become corrupt

How MS Word documents become  Corrupt

The information below has been gathered from Microsoft’s MVP website.

Further info can be found via this link http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/AppErrors/CorruptDoc.htm

How will I know if my document is corrupt ?

If you notice that your Scribe document has lost some of its text or formatting*, it is likely that you are experiencing document corruption. There are numerous ways Word documents can corrupt due to conditions in the local user environment. Below is a listing of these conditions and their attending symptoms.

Saving a document when resources are low can cause corruptions. If you notice Word start to slow down noticeably it is always best to quit and restart Word immediately; to close any other applications that are open; and to clear the clipboard, by selecting any character and copying it. Because of this it is recommended to have as few applications open as possible when creating, editing and saving documents in Scribe.

Other signs that you are low on resources: fonts suddenly not displaying properly; the wrong application icons appearing on your Desktop or in Windows Explorer (e.g. Word's icon appearing where Excel's should be). If you get these symptoms, restart Windows immediately.

A corrupt printer driver can corrupt memory; and if you then save, this can corrupt the document. Symptoms: Word often crashes when printing (cure: reinstall the driver).

Recreating  a “Clean” template from a suspected Corrupt version

- If using Word 2000 or Above:

Select File + Save As Web page, quit Word, reopen the htm file and save it back in Word format – that usually (but not always) gets rid of corruptions. The HTML/XML format forces Word to completely re-create the internal structure of the document, either fixing or discarding the corrupt bits when it does.  Best of all, in the case of Word 2000 and above, almost all of the formatting and page layout is preserved.

Please note: to preserve your formatting, you must select the plain Save As "Web Page" option, not the Save As Web Page (Filtered).  If you use the Filtered option, you remove from the document all the formatting that an HTML browser cannot interpret: for example, page numbers and headers and footers.

*(Note: this is different than all formatting being lost, including pictures and tables.  This is usually caused by the document being opened and saved in an environment that does not have Microsoft Word, such as on a Mac Computer, or in some browsers such as Mozilla Firefox. Additionally if a user does not have Word permissions enabled in Scribe, this total loss of formatting can occur).