>> Presumably Word crashes like hell for everybody else too,
> 
> No.

Are you seriously suggesting that there are people for whom Word doesn't 
crash?

>> (Last time I tried it, my copy of Word ended up permanently broken 
>> until I erased my normal template and deleted a chunk of my per-user 
>> registry.)
> 
> Never heard of that before.  Put your pointer inside a heading, then 
> click the arrow next to that little box that says "Normal" at the top, 
> and choose "Heading 1".  Do that for all the titles.  Then, to change 
> that style, go to Format->Styles, click the little menu arrow next to 
> the one you want to change and "Modify...".  ANd then, once you've made 
> your changes, it applies them to everything in the document with that 
> style!!!!  Clever eh?

I guess my mistake was in attempting to *change* the default styles. You 
know, permanently. Seemed to screw up just about everything Word-related.

On the other hand, having to spent 20 minutes changing all the ugly 
style defaults to what *I* want them to be every single time I open Word 
just seems like way too much work...

>> Well no, they start with a blank report document that contains all the 
>> section headings and standard text, already formatted.
> 
> So it's not blank then ;-)  Sounds to me like maybe that document is 
> corrupt somehow, so every single "new" document they make still is based 
> on this corrupt file.  Try, just once, opening the file with "Open and 
> repair" and then save it again.  Then get them to use this one in future.

The documents built from this "blank report" document are reasonably 
reliable. The ones built from customer-supplied templates tend to crash 
incessently. So yes, I would imagine these templates are corrupted.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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487f5efe$1@news.povray.org...
> Well we churn out seemingly identical documents every month. Word crashes 
> quite a lot, but the poor souls using it just start again. And again. And 
> again. Until eventually they get to the finished product.

Well, that's just abnormal. Word versions post Word 97 are stable. They may 
crash once in a blue moon, but certainly not on a regular basis unless 
there's a very specific reason, which should be described in the KB and a 
few thousands dedicated forums. If the problem is so widespread, it should 
have been solved by your IT people by now. The last time I've seen stuff 
like this, it turned out that the IT department hadn't bothered to patch 
Office so the users were suffering from bugs fixed by MS years ago.

G.

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Gilles Tran wrote:

> Well, that's just abnormal. Word versions post Word 97 are stable. They may 
> crash once in a blue moon, but certainly not on a regular basis unless 
> there's a very specific reason, which should be described in the KB and a 
> few thousands dedicated forums. If the problem is so widespread, it should 
> have been solved by your IT people by now. The last time I've seen stuff 
> like this, it turned out that the IT department hadn't bothered to patch 
> Office so the users were suffering from bugs fixed by MS years ago.

I've mentioned the problem that certain customer-supplied document 
templates seem to massively increase the frequency of crashes. 
(Presumably these templates are just corrupted internally.) Other than 
that, the users generally avoid certain features because they either 
don't work properly or make Word unstable. By this method of feature 
avoidance, we manage to keep crashes to a reasonably small number.

I guess I would install some newer SRs and see if it makes any 
difference at all. But I don't hold out much hope. From what I've seen, 
these seem to fix specific issues like "if you press X and then press Y, 
it does something strange", rather than general issues like "numbered 
lists never work correctly".

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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487f687f$1@news.povray.org...
> (Presumably these templates are just corrupted internally.) Other than 
> that, the users generally avoid certain features because they either don't 
> work properly or make Word unstable. By this method of feature avoidance, 
> we manage to keep crashes to a reasonably small number.

And did anyone look up the KB or the MS groups to see whether there were 
some issues with those particular features? I've been using Office heavily 
for a long time now, and one good thing is that it's so massively used that 
the tiniest issues are documented (*). At worse, they're a terse message in 
the KB saying "we know there's a problem there but don't have a solution 
yet" but major stuff like crashes tend to be documented and fixed. As I 
said, Word from the 2000 version onward is stable now, if it doesn't work 
properly there's something fishy on your end. And yes, at least make sure 
that you have the latest service packs.

G.

(*) see the latest "important" Vista update. I resisted a couple of days 
before installing a 56 Mb file + reboot, looked up the WU number in the KB 
and found this gem:  http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/11/vista_update/

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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>>> Presumably Word crashes like hell for everybody else too,
>>
>> No.
> 
> Are you seriously suggesting that there are people for whom Word doesn't 
> crash?

FWIW, I've not had word crash since I got the version after Word 97. 
(So, call it 10 years.) :-)  Nor excel, for that matter.

Also, my XP doesn't crash, except recently I seem to have some hardware 
problems.  (It doesn't crash so much as about once a month randomly 
powers off in the middle of something.)

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
  Helpful housekeeping hints:
   Check your feather pillows for holes
    before putting them in the washing machine.

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"Orchid XP v8" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message
news:487f6620@news.povray.org...
> >> Presumably Word crashes like hell for everybody else too,
> >
> > No.
>
> Are you seriously suggesting that there are people for whom Word doesn't
> crash?
>

I don't think I've ever had Word crash on me.
I've had SQL Server crash and burn several times. I've had Windows 2000
bluescreen and shutdown more than once (it's in dire need of a reinstall).
I've had powerpoint simply close in the middle of a presentation.
However those are the exceptions, not the norm. If the products crashed like
hell, I wouldn't use them.

I also seem to recall that this is not the first time (or the second) we've
told you that your experience with Word is not normal.

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"Orchid XP v8" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message
news:487f687f$1@news.povray.org...
>  rather than general issues like "numbered lists never work correctly".
>

They don't? Please explain more.

btw, if you have a bug to report or a suggestion on an MS product, you can
log it at http://connect.microsoft.com
Anything posted there goes directly to the relevant product development
team.

Post a reply to this message

>> Are you seriously suggesting that there are people for whom Word 
>> doesn't crash?
> 
> FWIW, I've not had word crash since I got the version after Word 97. 
> (So, call it 10 years.) :-)  Nor excel, for that matter.

Don't think I've ever seen Excel crash - or any other element of Office, 
just Word.

(BTW, did you ever see the flight simulator?)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Gail Shaw wrote:
>> "numbered lists never work correctly".
> 
> They don't? Please explain more.

If you write a brand new document, and happen to insert a numbered list 
into it somewhere, it usually works fine. As soon as you try to do 
anything more complex, bizare behaviour results. Lists magically change 
themselves from bullet to numbered, or continue from lists elsewhere in 
the document, and when you try to reset them to start from zero, they 
either don't reset, or they reset but yet other parts of the document go 
wrong. And occasionally, the whole formatting of a section can go wrong. 
I've even seen bits of deleted text reappear overprinted on top of body 
text...

> btw, if you have a bug to report or a suggestion on an MS product, you can
> log it at http://connect.microsoft.com
> Anything posted there goes directly to the relevant product development
> team.

The Word MVP website has an entire *section* dedicated to this 
particular issue:

http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Numbering/WordsNumberingExplained.htm

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Gilles Tran wrote:

> And did anyone look up the KB or the MS groups to see whether there were 
> some issues with those particular features? I've been using Office heavily 
> for a long time now, and one good thing is that it's so massively used that 
> the tiniest issues are documented (*). At worse, they're a terse message in 
> the KB saying "we know there's a problem there but don't have a solution 
> yet" but major stuff like crashes tend to be documented and fixed.

As you probably know, it's frustratingly difficult to track down 
*exactly* what causes intermittent bugs such as "Word sometimes crashes 
if I use this template file".

> As I 
> said, Word from the 2000 version onward is stable now, if it doesn't work 
> properly there's something fishy on your end. And yes, at least make sure 
> that you have the latest service packs.

Well AFAIK all the Office 2003 machines are at a minimum of SR2 right 
now. I could see if SR3 makes any difference, but with intermittent 
problems you can never truly know if it's "fixed" or not...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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