I’m having a problem with MS Word on my office computer. If I open an existing document, it crashes. When I re-open Word, it crashes again because it’s trying to open the document that crashed it in the first place. This happens with different documents, not just one particular one. If I open word on its own (before attempting to open a document) I can do what I need to. If I open an existing document while I still have the new document open, Word crashes. But in this case I can restart Word and choose the new document and it doesn’t crash. If, as in the former case, I open an existing document without a new document being open, I have to restart my computer to be able to use Word again. I’m working from home the rest of the week, and it is not possible to restart my computer remotely.
Is this an issue I can fix? I’ve emailed our admin, who can contact the IT guy, who comes into the office tomorrow. But if there’s something simple I can do today, that would be great. (Also cheaper.)
It’s probably a corrupted template. Try this: go to your user directory and enable viewing hidden files. Then go to AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates and delete normal.dotm. It will be re-created when you start Word.
How do I find the user directory?
Found it. Seems to be fixed. fingers crossed
Thanks, yoyodyne.
Good advice, but …
I always recommend mentioning that if you’re an advanced Word user that template may contain hundreds of hours of valuable effort spent creating custom styles and other goodies.
So just blithely telling folks to “just delete it and it’ll be recreated” is only half true. The full truth is “just delete it and it’ll be recreated like in a brand new factory fresh installation of Word, losing all your style customizations.”
That’s also why complete advice includes periodically taking a copy elsewhere on your HD or even offline for safekeeping. I’d much rather lose the last style I slightly tweaked than the 20 custom styles which control all our corporate documents.
It happened again.
I wonder if something happened on a given date, and any files created after that ‘something’ are buggy? I’ve opened up files I created a long time ago that do not crash Word.
Is it possible that at some point you started creating documents based on a template other than Normal? If you can open one of the documents that causes problems, go to File | Options. Select Add Ins…, then in the Manage dropdown at the bottom select Templates and click Go. If it says something other than Normal in the box, delete it and click OK. Note: if you do have special styles defined, this will remove them, so save the doc as a copy just in case.
I’m doubtful this is your problem, but it’s worth ruling it out. If that doesn’t work, my next step would be a Repair of Office from the Control Panel | Programs.