Microsoft, that is.

I haven't been posting much because, even though I'm back home in Florida, we still have a lot of deliverables to complete this week. I'm working on a Word document, and when I try to save, I get a message that it can't because I either have too many files open, or there's no space on the disk. I only have one file open, and there's lots of space on the disk (I can download things to it, and save to it from other applications, and the problem appears on whatever drive I attempt to save to, including network drives).

For some reason, Word thinks that it has a problem that it doesn't. Has anyone ever seen this behavior? By the way, it's Word 97...

I'd work in Open Office, but I can't be sure that it will generate clean compatible files with tracked changes for the Word people to use when they integrate the book.

[Update about 6:30 Eastern]

It seems to be a problem with this particular file. I tried it on Patricia's machine and had the same problem. I can save smaller files, so I'll just have to cut'n'paste the sections I'm working on individually, and let them reintegrate it. But it doesn't look like a reinstall of Word or Office would fix it.

Standard way of dealing with Word, or Office for that matter.

Uninstall and Reinstall.

oh by the way, archive your outlook files first and put them on another drive.

Dennis

I have no Outlook files.

Rand

If you are not using Outlook for mail then good. If you are, these are the files that I am talking about.

When you do the uninstall thing, if you have not archived your mail files, you will lose them.

Dennis

You could try copy-pasting all to a new document. That worked with word 2000 back in the day.

I avoid the use of Microsoft malware as much as possible. My client makes me use Office.

You could try copy-pasting all to a new document.

I could try, but it does no good. Word refuses to save any document, to any drive, full stop.

Rand

Now that you mention it, I had that problem on a file when I was writing my book. If you cut and paste a section at a time into a new document, you should find the place where the problem is in the old doc and then just retype that part.

A pain, but that is the price of working with crappy software.

Dennis

It works out all right, since I don't need to rewrite the whole thing. I'm just responsible for a couple sections, so I'll just save them as sections, and let the guy in charge of the overall document integrate them back in.

I'm just glad that I don't have a software problem to deal with right now.

Try doing a "Save As..." with the type set to .rtf -- that usually works for me. Yes, it will keep the markups. No, they won't look exactly the same.

Regards,
Ric

Sounds like a corrupted file. Copy and paste to a new file, or Save as RTF.

Rand,

I see this problem nearly every damned day here at our small newspaper office. In our case, we're using Word 2001 running under Classic mode on fairly new Mac OSX computers. (We upgraded the office from older Mac OS9.2 machines last year.)

We had no trouble running Word 2001 under OS9.2, but this problem seems to occur all the time since we began running it under OSX's Classic mode. I haven't been able to narrow it down to any particular files or machines - it seems to happen randomly but more frequently when there are multiple files open.

The only solution I've been able to come up with is to upgrade the office to the newest version of Word, which runs natively under OSX, instead of in Classic mode. We' re still working on how to get 10 (legal) copies of Word 2004 without spending an arm & a leg.

I don't know if this is at all applicable to problems on the PC version of Word, but you have my sympathies in any case.

Rand,

I see this problem nearly every damned day here at our small newspaper office. In our case, we're using Word 2001 running under Classic mode on fairly new Mac OSX computers. (We upgraded the office from older Mac OS9.2 machines last year.)

We had no trouble running Word 2001 under OS9.2, but this problem seems to occur all the time since we began running it under OSX's Classic mode. I haven't been able to narrow it down to any particular files or machines - it seems to happen randomly but more frequently when there are multiple files open.

The only solution I've been able to come up with is to upgrade the office to the newest version of Word, which runs natively under OSX, instead of in Classic mode. We' re still working on how to get 10 (legal) copies of Word 2004 without spending an arm & a leg.

I don't know if this is at all applicable to problems on the PC version of Word, but you have my sympathies in any case.

With any version of Word, try this first. Search your PC for a file called "normal.dot" anything you find, rename to "normal.old". After that, relaunch Word. What this does is resets your templates which is usually the cause of the memory error, and several other problems. Give it a shot.

It's amazing what helpful stuff is on the net - look at
this link. I have seen comments that doing all this didn't help.

Quote from Dennis Wingo: "Standard way of dealing with Word, or Office for that matter.

Uninstall and Reinstall."

This in fact rarely fixes a problem with Office. You can save yourself a lot of time just by running the 'Detect and Repair' option under the 'Help' menu. Uninstalling leaves behind your Office Profile information created by the initial office installation. Much more manual scrubbing has to be done to return to a original preinstall state and even then most likely doesn't fix the problem. Reinstalling in essence is the same as doing a detect and repair which has the chance of isolating an altered dll file responsible for a particular application problem.

Patch patch patch. http://www.micro$oft.com/office

The excuse, "well it never did this before" doesn't negate the fact that there may well be a patch out there that addresses the very problem that maybe currently exhibited.

Check your running processes. Especially on older vesions of Word it had the nice habit of spawning multiple processes for the same application. If you close completely out of all office applications and then check the task manager and still see winword.exe running in the background -- kill it. I've seen situations where rebooting doesn't even get rid of these rogue processes.

Delete temp files. There is a nifty program out there call Crap Cleaner or CCleaner. Use it. http://www.filehippo.com/download_ccleaner/

Copy and paste text into notepad and then copy from notepad back into a new word document. When you copy text from Word documents into the clipboard memory your also copying all the "hidden" layers of formatting information in the document. When you paste into notepad which strictly deals with plain text and then copy back out again from notepad your stripping everything out except for the text only. Or you can try to use the "paste special" function under the edit menu and select the option for "text only".