Conference noted::ibmpc-95

                    <<< Note 2996.0 by VMSSPT::PAGLIARULO >>>
                         -< Help needed with WORD 97 >-


I also entered this in the MSWINDOWS conference but I want to reach as much
expertise as possible.

Word 97 just ate my final exam for a course I'm taking.  This is the
situation.  I am running Windows 95 at home and NT 4.0 here at work. On both
machines I have Office 97 loaded (which I am removing as soon as possible!). 
I started writing my final at home and saved it to floppy disk.  In a moment
of complete stupidity I did not save it on the hard drive.  I brought the
floppy into work yesterday opened the file and did some more work,.  Again I
saved it to floppy and did not save it to the hard drive.  When I tried to
open the file at home last night WORD could not open the file.  Instead I got
the following eror message:  "Word cannot open the document.  Try one or more
of the following: On the File menu, click Open to open the document.  Make
sure that the document has a .DOC extension."  None of htat works.  When I
just tied to open the document again here at work, so I could get the error
message, the system crashed. Nothing seems to work.  I need to access this
file.  I don't care if it's through word or anything else. Is there any way to
recover the data on this disk?  I don't care what it looks like when I do as
long as I have a file I can edit and recover.

HELP!!!
George

 re -1  Sorry about that.  Must have been the stress of watching 2 nights 
work go down the tubes.  Thanks for re-formatting it.

re .1

I meant Windows NT 4.0 actually crashed.

When I look at the file with explorer I can see the file and the size seems
to look ok but I am not sure.

I have tried copying the file to the hard disk, reading the file with
Notepad and Wordpad, on my machine as well as others, all to no avail.
When I try to copy to another folder the error is that it can't copy
because of performing an inpage operation. 
After I see if I can get any help from the notes files I will try chkdsk 
to see if it can recover any lost chains into files.

George

I've occasionally been able to recover "trashed" documents by opening a new 
document and then using insert->file to retrieve the problem document.

\dave
BowersD@mail.dec.com

Well, I used CHKDSK and was able to recover some of the data.  It's pretty
messed up but at least the text is there and I can clean it up.

This happened once before...which makes it especially stupid that I 
didn't save the file to the hard disk.  Has anyone else seen problems
when transferring files from Windows 95 to NT 4.0 using Word 97.  I'm
wondering if it's a aproblem with Word or with NT

George

    re: VMSSPT::PAGLIARULO
    
    George,
    
    Have you been careful to allow the floppy writes to complete before
    pulling the diskette out?  I can't see why you had file allocation
    errors otherwise.
    
    /Bill

    I wouldn't blame it on Word.  It sounds more like bad media (floppy) to
    me.  A bad/deteriorating floppy is much more likely than a multibillion
    dollar company releasing a major revision of a product that doesn't
    work as planned (although I'm sure some people would like to argue
    that!!  8^)
    
    With evidence of CHKDSK I'm even more convinced it was the floppy.
    
    Jason
    

"A bad/deteriorating floppy is much more likely than a multibillion dollar
 company releasing a major revision of a product that doesn't work as 
 planned"

Yeah shure, Microsoft would never do that! Thanks, I always like to start 
the day with a good joke!  Did you hear the one about the penguin and the 
seal?   ;-) many times over

I don't think it is the floppy.  I did suspect the floppy and would 
still susspect it if it happened once but I threw two of them away because 
of this. I have a hard time believing that all of a sudden, since I 
"upgraded" one system to NT 4.0 and installed Office 97 on both that my 
floppies are suddenly bad...but only under this set of circumstances.
Especially since I can initially read the file on the floppy on the same 
machine I did the copy on.  I think there is some interaction between the 
Windows 95 system and the NT system and Word that is corrupting the file.
I'm going to play around and see if I can pin the conditions down.

	As to Bill's question, yes I believe that I am waiting for all writes 
to be complete before removing the disk.

George 

    re: .7
    
    Well, I've received mail that DIGITAL, for now, is recommending
    that writers keep using Office 95 and not upgrade to Office 97 
    because of the bugs in it.

The mail I received said to not upgrade to Office 97 only because it made
it more difficult to interchange files with other users (though if you
know about this problem it's easy to avoid.)  I've been using Office 97 for
a while and haven't had problems with it.

Regarding the base note problem, I DO think it was a bad floppy - the symptoms
don't match a software problem.

					Steve

Did the floppy have "enough" free space to hold the document and word's
temp-files?  When working on floppies, remember, word creates a temp-file
where it was opened.

-Bill

The floppy was newly formatted and had no other files on it.

George

RE: .9

	Steve is right, Office97 works fine. The "problems" are
	a new file format that Word 6/Word95 have difficulty
	reading. BUT, there is an add-on to Word6 and Word95 that
	allows those users to read the .DOC file. It's at
	http://www.microsoft.com/word

	Office97 has so many very cool features that make it a 
	worthwhile upgrade.

RE: .last

	The floppy may be empty when you start, but if the file
	and the temp files are bigger than the floppy, you'r
	outta luck.

							mike

    NT V4.0 allegedly has data corruption problems in certain
    circumstances, fixed by "service packs". Got any of those installed ?
    (SP2 has a bad name. SP1 sounds OK).
    
    regards
    john

Re: problems with Word 97

It has one problem that I've found.  It seems that Word-97 no longer
supports the creation of Frames.  Instead, you create a text box, which
seems to do everything that frames used to do.  

It's supposed to support frames in older documents.  Unfortunately, one of
my older documents with frames in it (my thesis for school) would cause
Word-97 to crash (as in bring up nasty "something really bad happened;
press OK for your life to get worse" windows, followed by no happy paper
clips).

I recreated the document with text boxes instead of frames and no more
crashes.  Cutting and pasting frames out of an older document would make it
crash again.  Seems somewhat reproducible.

Oh well...I never understood frames anyway ;-)

Burns

    As a note:
    
    Microsoft only supports Office 97 on Windows NT Workstation with the
    following minimums:
    
    Windows NT 3.51 Service Pack 5
    Windows NT 4.0 Service Pack 2
    
    If you are not at this minimum, they will not work on any escalations.
    
    (I'm sure this is documented somewhere in the Office 97 readme...)
    
    --Ron

    As a general comment,
    
    I find Word-97 to be more prone to crash itself than any of its
    previous incarnations.  (NT 4.0, sp2)
    
    Somewhat irritating.

    More prone? I can effortlessly crash Word 95 any time...

Yeah, I'm sure I can find ways to crash -95 any time I want to.

Problem is that -97 keeps crashing all the times I DON'T want it to.

Granted, I got pretty good at knowing all the places 6.0 would fall over,
and working around them.  '97 seems to have so many more cases that happen
at such unexpected times.  I didn't have this problem with Word-95, even
though it certainly has its share of crashers.

    Funny... but I can't easily crash any of the Office 97 or Office 95
    components.  Of course, I'm far from a "power user".  If you really are
    crashing and it's reproducible on more than just your box, please document
    it and supply a bug report to Microsoft.  Heck, document it here and I'll
    pass it to our technical account manager.

    Products don't get fixed by complaining to the air.

    --Ron