Just recently, something is popping up with MS Word. Literally. I open a file to look at it. I don’t do anything else, and then I click the X to close the file. I’m getting a popup asking me if I want to save my changes. Only there were no changes to the document.
Did I somehow fat-finger a secret button that changes preferences to ‘Always ask for more clicks upon exiting’? Maybe something changed during the updates that happened over the holidays? How do I change it back so that I don’t have to do the extra click? (You may recall that I’m annoyed it takes four or five clicks to save an Excel document as a .csv file. I hate having extra clicks when a Word document has not been changed.)
Make a copy of the file
Open the copy and turn tracking on (Review / track changes)
Save the file.
Open the file, do nothing, and when it asks you if you want to save changes say yes.
Then open both files and have Word do its comparison of them (Review / compare)
That should tell you if any thing was automatically changed (might I guess I’m not sure how compare handles things like {Date} and of course unless you wait a day, the date won’t have changed.
Auto-updated fields like a date field would be my guess. The easy way to find fields is to go to the start of the document and hit F11; it will jump to the next field it finds. Keep doing that to find any in the main document text. To find fields in the header or footer, hit Alt-F9 which will toggle the display of field codes. A date field will look something like:
{ DATE @ “M/d/yyyy” }
I don’t see anything that looks like data formatting. Actually, the documents are mostly ‘pictures’ (or ‘tables’, or whatever).
When I FTP a file to a website, I get a verification page. I click Ctrl+A and Ctrl+C. Then I open a Word document and do a Crtl+V and Enter. Then I go to a different website and send a different file. When I get the verification page back, I highlight the line that I want in the table and click Crtl+C. Then I paste it below the line I inserted after pasting the previous thing. I may do this for one more website, or I may only do it for one website. After pasting the stuff I need to save, I save the file. Other than the line(s) between the paste(s), I don’t type anything.
There was a previous thread that’s probably of limited use. In that case, it was a bug with Smart Tags in Word 2002. Hopefully you’re a little more current than that. There was also a “feature” that updated spelling lists when “automatically check spelling” was turned on and caused it to prompt to save, but I think that’s been gone since Word 97.
One suggestion from that thread that might be useful if the field code thing isn’t applicable: try closing Word and deleting the Normal template (sometimes a messed-up template can create issues). The Normal template will be recreated next time you open Word. DON’T do this if you have updated the styles or made changes to Normal. It’s safest to make a copy of it if you aren’t sure.
Maybe you’re pasting something like an image as a link to the website instead of static content. After you save your document the first time, go to the Info page (in Word 2010 and 2013 click the File menu). On the right you’ll see headings like Properties and potentially Related Dates and Related Documents. At the bottom of this column, if you see a small link to “Edit Links to Files”, it means there are external links. Click this and from there you can convert any links to static content by clicking Break Links.
Bummer. Maybe it’s something with pagination where some of the images don’t fit on a page, or a table/paragraph style has “keep together” set and Word is trying to repaginate it each time it opens. I know you said the default printer hasn’t changed, but maybe you changed the paper size or orientation inadvertently which would also cause it to repaginate.
If none of those are applicable, try replacing the Normal template. And if that doesn’t work, I’m out of ideas. Sorry.
You don’t say which version of Word you have, but it could be that you are opening 97-2003 style documents (extension .doc) and you have your options set to save as latest version (extension .docx) or vice versa. If that’s the case, even if you don’t change a thing, Word will ask if you want to save the file, this time as the new/other format.
The version is Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010, 14.0.7140.5002 (32-bit). The documents have a .docx extension.
Office is on my work computer, which is Windows. I don’t know what version, since Microsoft hides that information instead of just having it visible or having a Help tab with ‘About Windows’. (Although I’ve posted it in other threads – I don’t remember). Word asks me if I want to save the document whether I’m physically on the Windows computer, or if I’m accessing it from my Mac via RDC.
