Disappearing text and other weirdness

P

_pub01

Folks,

I have a document of about 45 pages in Word 2003. I am experiencing
some very strange behaviour. First, whenever I am in Outline view, the
page continually jumps or blinks, that is the outline toolbar quickly
disappears and reappears and the main page jumps back and forth
accordingly.

Another problem is a page of my work that sometimes disappears right
before my eyes. This page also seems to either display or not display
depending on where my cursor is in the rest of the document. Sometimes
I can see the text on the page but when I click to the left of the
chapter title at the top of the page, the whole page of text
disappears. Apparently related is that in my table of contents, the
page number for the chapter just mentioned shows an error message
saying "bookmark not defined.

This is my master's thesis we're talking about and as I approach my
deadline I'd really like to solve these problems before they get worse
(yes I do backups). Should I consider copying and pasting everything
into a new document or something?

Thanks in adavance...

ET
 
S

stevenmgregory

ET,
I work as a technical writer and have seen this on a couple
occasions very recently with, amazingly enough, Word 2003! There are a
couple things to consider. First, how much formatting is in the
document? Do you use a lot of bullets, tables, styles? As Word has
become more bloated, these styles and formatting problems get worse.
Second, how many graphics do you have in the document? Or rather, what
is their size? Word, for years, has not handled heavy graphics and
text well. Though it sounds like your issue is more with formatting,
this is an area to consider.
I hate to say it, but your best bet might be saving it as an RTF
file (to preserve most formatting), then opening it back in Word and
re-saving it as a Word doc (to allow a table of contents,
cross-references, etc.). That will clear most of the formatting
issues. You'll have to redo headings and cross-references and such,
but it will at least keep your document intact. Otherwise, you're
looking at having to copy and paste into an entirely new document.
By the way, if you still have problems, consider using the Java
office suite to finish up. It will read a Word document (and thus
preserve your formatting), but will also handle the
text/formatting/graphics issue better (assuming you have a computer
that is no more than a couple years old and with at least 512 MB of
RAM).
Good luck!

Steve
 
P

_pub01

There is quite a bit of formatting in the document, with at least 5
levels of outline representing 5 formatting styles. I also use Endnote
9 to create and manage references. The scary thing is that I haven't
yet placed any of my planned graphics in the document!

I guess I don't have a choice of using another prgram since I require
Endnote.

I suppose I need to investigate your and other methods to clean my
file.
 
P

_pub01

I'm at work using a Mac right now. I thought maybe I'd see a change for
the better switching OS and Word versions, but it's still acting funky.
It looks like the Mac version doesn't have the Open and Repair option.
I also just tried converting to web page and reconverting to word
file...still screwy.

Ugghh. What are the chances anyone would be willing to look at my file
and see if they notice where the problem lies?

Thanks,

Evan
 
P

_pub01

Well, I seem to have finally gotten the file to behave by copying,
section by section, everything but the last paragraph symbol. Gimme a
break...

Thanks to you all and other internet sources. I don't know where I'd be
without the internet.

Evan
 
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