crashes while editing footnotes

[Odysseus]

I have a continued problem with Word 2008 (with all updates applied): on
a fifty-page document with 150 or so footnotes, editing footnotes will
occasionally, but regularly, cause a crash. This happens if the document
is in .docx format or .doc format, although the crashes appear to be a
bit rarer when the document is in .doc format.

John McGhie and I have corresponded about this, and he tells me to
remove all the footnotes, edit them separately, and add them only when
I'm all done.

That seems *far* too time-consuming to me. Furthermore, footnotes is not
an advanced feature of word processors.

Does anyone have any other suggestions? Has anyone used Nisus Writer Pro?

 

[John McGhie]

Yeah

Well, sadly, "Footnotes" is an extremely advanced feature of a
word-processor. Seriously! The technology it takes to get them right is
huge.

To avoid heading you off on a wild goose chase, we should attention you up
front to the fact that the "problem" you have is in your document, not in
Word. If the internal structure of your document was clean, you could edit
footnotes to your heart's content and Word would stay with you.

But if your document contains a large number of unresolved tracked changes,
then you will get crashes editing almost anything, including footnotes.
Resolve the changes and the crashes will go away. Add the footnotes to the
document after you have completed and revised the text, and the crashes may
not happen at all.

Tracked changes increase the internal complexity of a document by an order
of magnitude. At some point, every application that supports change
tracking will fall over if you have too many.

I think it is reasonable to suggest that the technique I suggested "seems"
far too time-consuming to you because you have not tried it yet. I find it
takes about one tenth of the time that would be taken to put the footnotes
in one-by-one (even less if you count the crashes you do not have...)

Now let's have a look at some of your other options:

Most people who are seriously into Footnotes/Endnotes use EndNote or one of
its competitors. Note that footnote applications add complexity to a
document and therefore make it more likely that the document will crash, in
Word, WordPerfect, FrameMaker, Mellel, OpenOffice, Nisus, etc...

EndNote behaves better in PC versions of Word.

People willing to take the time to learn Troff, TeX, LaTeX and Emacs can get
perfect, stable results every time with giant files and breathtaking
processing speed. But you have to love Terminal...

About the only other application that runs natively on a Mac and will do
professional footnotes is Adobe InDesign. Many would argue that its
footnoting ability is not as high as Word's, and that it is not necessarily
less likely to crash. However, what it does do it does very well and you
may find it fills your need better than Word.

EndNote enables you to add footnotes to an RTF file, which enables you to
use practically any word-processor there is.

There is a wider choice on the PC side of the fence:

Word 2003 and Word 2007 are more robust: they will do much more and crash
less often. They both run very well in Parallels if your Mac has lots of
memory.

Technical Writers preparing long documents sometimes prefer FrameMaker.
Complex long documents is what FrameMaker was designed for, and it does them
very well. It's footnoting is very good. But it does crash quite a bit

WordPerfect is an option: it tends to be stable, but slow. OpenOffice is
fine if your document needs are less complex.

If you look around the Internet, you will see that Microsoft Word is almost
the only application seriously discussed in this topic. There is a reason
for that... Overall, for most users, Word is the best there is.

Word 2004 is generally much more stable and powerful for this purpose than
Word 2008. Word 2010 ought to be faster and more powerful than Word 2004.

Hope this helps

I have a continued problem with Word 2008 (with all updates applied): on
a fifty-page document with 150 or so footnotes, editing footnotes will
occasionally, but regularly, cause a crash. This happens if the document
is in .docx format or .doc format, although the crashes appear to be a
bit rarer when the document is in .doc format.

John McGhie and I have corresponded about this, and he tells me to
remove all the footnotes, edit them separately, and add them only when
I'm all done.

That seems *far* too time-consuming to me. Furthermore, footnotes is not
an advanced feature of word processors.

Does anyone have any other suggestions? Has anyone used Nisus Writer Pro?

This email is my business email -- Please do not email me about forum
matters unless you intend to pay!

--

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP (Word, Mac Word), Consultant Technical Writer,
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
Sydney, Australia. | Ph: +61 (0)4 1209 1410
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]

 

[Odysseus]

Well, sadly, "Footnotes" is an extremely advanced feature of a
word-processor. Seriously! The technology it takes to get them right is
huge.

I never had this problem before Word 2008, and this is my third book
manuscript. I've been writing books since the early 1990s

Tracked changes increase the internal complexity of a document by an order
of magnitude. At some point, every application that supports change
tracking will fall over if you have too many.

But I don't have any tracked changes in my document!

I think it is reasonable to suggest that the technique I suggested "seems"
far too time-consuming to you because you have not tried it yet. I find it
takes about one tenth of the time that would be taken to put the footnotes
in one-by-one (even less if you count the crashes you do not have...)

I wish you would provide detailed steps, then. But how one removes (and
then later adds ) footnotes one-by-one is daunting!

 

[Odysseus]

To avoid heading you off on a wild goose chase, we should attention you up
front to the fact that the "problem" you have is in your document, not in
Word. If the internal structure of your document was clean, you could edit
footnotes to your heart's content and Word would stay with you.

Sure, but how did the document get this way? And more importantly, how
can I repair the damage?

--Marc

 

[John McGhie]

I feel your pain I have been writing books since ... hell... 1978-ish!

Remember the Green Remington? Tracking changes on that was a real problem


It is "usually" the numbering that causes this misery. The internal
numbering structure in the document gets corrupted. Often, by "Keep Track
of Formatting". Because it is the internal structure that gets corrupted,
it doesn't matter at all whether the document is actually using bullets or
numbering at all: the issue is that one of the foundations of the document
is crumbling and eventually the house falls down.

If that's what it is, a Maggie will "often" cure it...

The Maggie:

1. Create a new blank document
2. Carefully select all of the text in the bad document EXCEPT the last
paragraph mark
3. Copy it.
4. Paste in the new document.
5. Save under a new file name and close all, then re-open.

This technique for de-corrupting is known as "Doing a 'Maggie'", after
Margaret Secara from the TECHWR-L mailing list, who first publicised the
technique.

If you care to email me one of those documents, I will take a squiz and see
if I can spot the problem for you.

Cheers

Sure, but how did the document get this way? And more importantly, how
can I repair the damage?

--Marc

This email is my business email -- Please do not email me about forum
matters unless you intend to pay!

--

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP (Word, Mac Word), Consultant Technical Writer,
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
Sydney, Australia. | Ph: +61 (0)4 1209 1410
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]

 

[John McGhie]

OK, to add footnotes "later" I work with two documents: one contains the
"Text" the other contains the footnote text.

As I am writing, I simply type [Fn123] in the text where I want the footnote
reference to go, then switch to the other document and type the same number
and the text of the footnote. I save the Footnote document in Plain Text.

After I have finished and revised the text, I then search for "[Fn###]" and
as I come to each one, insert a real footnote and copy the text in from the
Footnote Document.

In my case, I use a Macro to do that, which of course makes the whole
process a single click, and is one reason why I don't use Word 2008 for
"real work".

The reason this works is that the footnotes get inserted in a single editing
session, so nothing gets a chance to add any more corruptions to the
numbering structure while the footnote mechanism is trying to use it

Cheers

I never had this problem before Word 2008, and this is my third book
manuscript. I've been writing books since the early 1990s


But I don't have any tracked changes in my document!


I wish you would provide detailed steps, then. But how one removes (and
then later adds ) footnotes one-by-one is daunting!

This email is my business email -- Please do not email me about forum
matters unless you intend to pay!

--

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP (Word, Mac Word), Consultant Technical Writer,
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
Sydney, Australia. | Ph: +61 (0)4 1209 1410
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]

 

[Clive Huggan]

Sure, but how did the document get this way? And more importantly, how
can I repair the damage?

--Marc

Hello Marc,

John has answered the second question with his admirable advice.

As to the answer to your first question: it requires some questions back.
Are you the only person to work on the document? Or does it get sent to and
fro between authors? Do you use Track Changes?

For heavy-duty users of Word, problems with footnotes usually arrive with
corrupt documents or text contributed by others out in the Wild Woods. (I
note that John has suggested doing a "Maggie", which is highly likely to be
applicable to footnotes; other methods are at
http://word.mvps.org/Mac/DocumentCorruption.html)

But for documents originated and entirely processed on the one computer, in
the absence of tracked changes footnote corruption (with 150 footnotes in 50
pages being fairly common) has never occurred for me. Hence the three
questions above if you want to pursue that line and if John doesn't cover it
in the meantime.

Cheers,

Clive Huggan
Canberra, Australia
(My time zone is 5-11 hours different from the Americas and Europe, so my
follow-on responses to those regions can be delayed)
====================================================

 

[Odysseus]

But for documents originated and entirely processed on the one computer, in
the absence of tracked changes footnote corruption (with 150 footnotes in 50
pages being fairly common) has never occurred for me.

Never occurred for you in which application and under which OS? Word
2004 for Mac? Word 2008 for Mac?

I never experienced crashes when modifying footnotes in Word 2004 --
they all began with Word 2008.

And no, I don't share these documents, and I don't track changes, either.

 

[Odysseus]

OK, to add footnotes "later" I work with two documents: one contains the
"Text" the other contains the footnote text.

As I am writing, I simply type [Fn123] in the text where I want the footnote
reference to go, then switch to the other document and type the same number
and the text of the footnote. I save the Footnote document in Plain Text.

After I have finished and revised the text, I then search for "[Fn###]" and
as I come to each one, insert a real footnote and copy the text in from the
Footnote Document.

In my case, I use a Macro to do that, which of course makes the whole
process a single click, and is one reason why I don't use Word 2008 for
"real work".

The reason this works is that the footnotes get inserted in a single editing
session, so nothing gets a chance to add any more corruptions to the
numbering structure while the footnote mechanism is trying to use it

I wonder whether we have different work styles. Do you work in a purely
linear fashion? In my case, I'm constantly adding and modifying
footnotes, and moving text around. I cannot imagine how keeping a list
of numbered footnotes would be anything but a nightmare, unless your
macros take care of numbering and reordering as well ;-)

--Marc

 

[Clive Huggan]

Never occurred for you in which application and under which OS? Word
2004 for Mac? Word 2008 for Mac?

Word 2004 for the past few years and Leopard and earlier; and Word 2001 and
OS 9 and earlier. But I haven't downgraded to Word 2008 -- the lack of VBA
was a deal-breaker for me, but 2004 also appears to be somewhat more robust
than 2008.

I never experienced crashes when modifying footnotes in Word 2004 --
they all began with Word 2008.

That might explain it. ;-)

And no, I don't share these documents, and I don't track changes, either.

Stranger than fiction, then.

Some years back I used to get some terrible footnote problems after pasting
in text from others' documents (Word 2000 and 2003). As far as I could tell
the body text itself was not corrupt; only the footnote formatting. That was
when I started to Paste Special => Unformatted with all incoming text (in
practice I invoke a macro because it occurs so often) and to apply my own
styles to the new text subsequently.

If I were you, as a fairly intensive user of Word, I would upgrade back to
Word 2004 and wait till Word Next if you can't solve your problem shortly.

CH
===

 

[Clive Huggan]

OK, to add footnotes "later" I work with two documents: one contains the
"Text" the other contains the footnote text.

As I am writing, I simply type [Fn123] in the text where I want the footnote
reference to go, then switch to the other document and type the same number
and the text of the footnote. I save the Footnote document in Plain Text.

After I have finished and revised the text, I then search for "[Fn###]" and
as I come to each one, insert a real footnote and copy the text in from the
Footnote Document.

In my case, I use a Macro to do that, which of course makes the whole
process a single click, and is one reason why I don't use Word 2008 for
"real work".

The reason this works is that the footnotes get inserted in a single editing
session, so nothing gets a chance to add any more corruptions to the
numbering structure while the footnote mechanism is trying to use it

I wonder whether we have different work styles. Do you work in a purely
linear fashion? In my case, I'm constantly adding and modifying
footnotes, and moving text around. I cannot imagine how keeping a list
of numbered footnotes would be anything but a nightmare, unless your
macros take care of numbering and reordering as well ;-)

--Marc

Although your question is directed to John, Marc -- and he'll undoubtedly
respond soon -- in view of my other reply I'll just clarify that in my work
I am also constantly adding and modifying footnotes, moving text around and
moving the placement of some footnotes, without ever experiencing any
problems (in Word 2004).

Clive Huggan
============

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Marc:

No, I'm the same: change my mind more frequently than I change ... Never
mind...

Yes, my Macro does in fact insert the numbers both sides, but half the time,
I don't use that function, because it's just as easy to type it. I have
both documents open: the plain text document shows me what the next footnote
number is because it's one more than the last one there.

Of course, the numbers in the document, and the numbers in t he footnote
document have to correspond: but they don't have to be the actual footnote
numbers that will exist in the completed document. They don't even have to
be numbers: just a unique text string you can Find with Find later.

When you insert the "Real" footnote and its text, Word will automatically
number it at that point.

Anyway, if you don't want to, I'm not selling anything Personally, I
don't use 2008 for real work: it's not powerful enough.

cheers

OK, to add footnotes "later" I work with two documents: one contains the
"Text" the other contains the footnote text.

As I am writing, I simply type [Fn123] in the text where I want the footnote
reference to go, then switch to the other document and type the same number
and the text of the footnote. I save the Footnote document in Plain Text.

After I have finished and revised the text, I then search for "[Fn###]" and
as I come to each one, insert a real footnote and copy the text in from the
Footnote Document.

In my case, I use a Macro to do that, which of course makes the whole
process a single click, and is one reason why I don't use Word 2008 for
"real work".

The reason this works is that the footnotes get inserted in a single editing
session, so nothing gets a chance to add any more corruptions to the
numbering structure while the footnote mechanism is trying to use it

I wonder whether we have different work styles. Do you work in a purely
linear fashion? In my case, I'm constantly adding and modifying
footnotes, and moving text around. I cannot imagine how keeping a list
of numbered footnotes would be anything but a nightmare, unless your
macros take care of numbering and reordering as well ;-)

--Marc

This email is my business email -- Please do not email me about forum
matters unless you intend to pay!

--

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP (Word, Mac Word), Consultant Technical Writer,
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
Sydney, Australia. | Ph: +61 (0)4 1209 1410
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]