People, start your own Great Debates thread if you want, but aren’t we supposed to be helping bodypoet?
bodypoet, I’ll second what everyone has said about getting the latest updates for Word. They’re always coming out with updates/upgrades for Office products. Another thing you might consider is running a program like Scandisk to make sure your file doesn’t have errors in it. I’ve seen disk errors like yours that caused very similar behavior in my files.
bodypoet have u tried this:
left click your word file once to highlight it
hold shift, and right click the word file, and in the pop up menu select “open with”
select “notepad”
no promises, but this might open your file, and if there any glitches just copy and paste the whole thing back into word to re-edit.
Another option you may try: Copy the file (don’t “Move”… if you’re not sure, right-click once on the file, hold, and drag it to another location… this will bring up a small menu after dragging. Select “Copy Here”). After copying the file, try renaming it, while being sure to add “.doc” on the end.
I’ve had numerous document errors over the years, and this has worked to solve some of them.
bodypoet,
If you get an error of a corrupted normal.dot file, the easy way to fix it is to copy that file from another computer with a working version of Word 97. All your customised stuff will be lost, however.
You can open most Word documents in Wordpad.
How is bug free a mathematical impossibility? Upon what did you based that assertion?
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by abel *
**People, start your own Great Debates thread if you want, but aren’t we supposed to be helping bodypoet?
She sent me the file. It was corrupted and I extracted the text for her last night with Word 2000’s “recover text” option. The formatting was lost but she has the all text back and was working on getting it reformatted correctly.
Thank you all so very much for your ideas and offers of help.
astro was able to send me the ms back, and was able to tell me that it was corrupted. Somehow, I find that kind of comforting…at least it wasn’t hidden away in my computer, perfectly formatted and edited, laughing at me as I tried in vain to open it.
I finished the proofreading (ended up re-doing the entire document, but it was only about 100 pages, so not too bad) and sent that baby off to its owner. I’m gonna charge him about a million dollars, I think. (Or maybe I should pay him, since I took so long wrestling with my computer.)
Now I’m going to concentrate on fixing whatever the problem is that caused this in the first place. My computer has serious issues, I can tell just by the way it hums.
Thanks again for everyone’s input. Feel free to resume your debate on…um…the subject you were debating.Maybe no one will notice that I’m clueless here…
You can have WORD make backup copies every time you save so you will always have a backup copy to fall back on. As Astro says, you can also open it with a straight text processor and recover the raw text.
Oh trust me: I am the new backup (on disk) copy poster girl. I had the original text, unedited, in my files, so I was able to start over with no problem, but it’s a pain to lose a few hours of work on anything like that.
This book was an exception–usually I’m proofreading a …For Dummies book, which can run 400 pages and have a tendency to be a tad bit boring. I also usually have a much tighter deadline (100 pp/day); this one was a self-imposed deadline for a friend of mine who needs his book asap.
Thanks,
k
It’s common knowledge among programmers and testers. I’ve tried looking for a cite, but the best I can do is Cem Kaner’s book Testing Computer Software. He has a really good explanation. The gist of it is that a program that is designed to write “1+1=2” will have bugs. The smallest application there is will not always work everywhere, all the time, without exception. Dependencies on environment, interaction with other software, upgrades in the software on peripheral devices, error handling, etc etc.
(Strangely, I have found no mention of this so called “bug-free guarantee” in the TeX cite provided by psychonaut.)
One other thing I wanted to mention inre: normal.dot is that you don’t have to copy a normal.dot file from another machine running Word. That file is self-generating - simply rename or delete the old one, and a new one with all the defaults will get created the next time you launch Word.
That doesn’t surprise me, considering that you more or less announced your refusal to even look at my references.
Here’s the exact wording of the guarantee, straight from Knuth, along with a sample cheque: http://truetex.com/knuthchk.htm. Knuth also has his own web page which contains more information.
I know that the next thing you’re going to say is that there’s no way you can mathematically guarantee the absence of bugs. To this I respond, please read the reference before you post. I am using “guarantee” here in its everyday sense, as in the phrase “satisfaction guaranteed or your money back”. Businesses who make such a claim are not saying that it is impossible not to be satisfied with their product, but rather that any dissatisfaction will be promptly remedied. Most software end-user licence agreements explicitly disclaim such a guarantee.
As for your claim about the impossibility bug-free software, that’s true only when you consider extrinsic bugs such as unexpected behaviour of the operating system or run-time engine, faults in the compiler, user error, incomplete or ambiguous language specifications, and so forth. If you can prove that the syntax of a given language is unambiguous (this is certainly possible for context-free grammars), and can agree on the semantics, then a piece of software is nothing more than an algorithm; a purely mechanical finite set of steps that operates entirely deterministically. Algorithms can be and are routinely proved to be correct or incorrect; open any mathematics textbook and you’ll see airtight proofs for Euclid’s Algorithm, Fleury’s Algorithm, the Archimedean Algorithm, the Sieve of Eratosthenes, etc. By this I mean that it can be shown that the algorithms always do exactly what their creators claim they do; nothing more and nothing less. I don’t claim that Knuth has actually gone to the trouble of mathematically proving that the algorithm executed by his software is correct (to do so would probably take years, if not centuries), but I would hardly say that it is impossible in a mathematical sense.
Um, where did I announce that exactly? Believe it or not, I actually did go looking for an explanation of the moneyback guarantee. Your original link was to a Google search result - I ask my fellow dopers to try and arrive at your 2nd link posted above: http://truetex.com/knuthchk.htm, based on your original link.
Oh, and that check was for $2.56?? No wonder he hasn’t gone bankrupt.
Oh, I see now. I guess I misunderstood this:
So I get a check if I’m not satisfied, or if I find a bug?
And finally:
Dammit, I had to go and use the word “mathematical.” I see now that I’m living in the real world where computer problems exist, and you’re living in a textbook. :rolleyes: I’m going to be sure and explain things just like this to the next tester that gives me a PowerPoint bug to fix. “Oh, it crashes when you print? Since PowerPoint is merely an algorithm, designed to do exactly what I claim it does; nothing more and nothing less, I’m afraid that your problem is more of an extrinsic issue.”
Look - go back to TeX and enjoy yourself, I’m sure you will both be very happy. Just don’t expect to stroll in here and arrogantly rip on Word and Microsoft, make claims about what TeX can do that Word can’t, and fail to back it up with anything more than a link to a Google search, w/o taking some heat for it.
psychonaut While I certainly agree that TeX is a more powerful and flexible package than Word, I think you’d also agree that the price is a steeper learning curve. With Word you can just click and type, whereas with TeX you’re forced to consider the structure of the document you’re producing.
Of course, this isn’t to say Word is the only word processor available…which brings me to another solution for bodypoet. I’ve seen this problem with Word documents many times (so it’s not just you), and I’ve often managed to fix it by opening the file in StarOffice 5.2 (which is free to download from www.staroffice.com). Open in StarOffice, and if it manages it OK, then Save…As choosing Word97 as your file type (I tend to give it a new name too, so I can revert to the original if things go wrong).
As an added bonus, this tends to get rid of a lot of the rubbish Word tends to leave in a file, decreasing your file size.
I’ve had similar success with Excel spreadsheets (and actually cut one down from 70MB to 6MB; I’ve no idea what else was being kept in there!).
Since the problem seems to be resolved, I’ll close this thread.
This seems to be a good place to remind you all that platform wars are not permitted here. If you dislike MS Word or any other software product or producer, keep that opinion to yourself. Facts directly related to the problem are always appreciated, but “Word sux”/“Does not” really is not helpful.
bibliophage
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