Corrupt Word file corrupts whole system

Thanks, everyone, for sharing your workarounds. (Mine was to switch to Nissus Writer Pro. The compatability is amazing, since it uses RTF as its native format. It even transfers comments and markup back and forth.)

For professional work, Gotter's solution is a good one even without this bug. It sounds less painful than chopping into many documents.

Gotterfunken wrote:

I've never noticed any difference between hi-res and low-res for the kinds of pictures I'm using, at least for on-screen purposes, and when it comes time to send the piece in to have it published, I send the hi res images separately. The low-res images just work as place-holders. I can get a lot more images (x 10) into the file this way before the thing bonks.

He comments: "Hopefully, this problem will get fixed at a deeper level before long."

Answer: no. 😠 A big bug fix from Microsoft yesterday, but I doubt it fixed anything, and I'm not going to test it.

Well I am here to tell you I AM HAVING THIS VERY SAME PROBLEM. 2 days after I installed Office 2011 that I paid for from the microsoft website I had a hard drive crash. I put in an SDD drive it worked fine until I installed office. For sh**ts and giggles I reformatted and reinstalled mountain lion on my old drive put it back in the macbook and it worked great until ..... you guessed it I INSTALLED OFFICE!! Thought I got a bad drive so I bought a 7200rpm 1 tera bite but it in a cradle and booted from it my system worked perfect till I installed office now my macbook won't even boot in safemode.

Coincidence? Or Office 2011 is causing it?

I am SO glad to have find this thread. Same issue for me. For two years and two MBPs!!! Ginormous Word file and crash after crash. Blamed MS. Suspected time machine, but couldn't figure out link. Didn't think to stop TM altogether after disconnecting external drive... As I write this began disk repair so nervous about outcome. Where is the fix, Apple??? I'm such a diehard fan, ever since Lisa. Still have a Duo and iMac and Quadra that work. Puhleeeeze do not disappoint me!

kaizenshihan wrote:

Well I am here to tell you I AM HAVING THIS VERY SAME PROBLEM. 2 days after I installed Office 2011 that I paid for from the microsoft website I had a hard drive crash. I put in an SDD drive it worked fine until I installed office. For sh**ts and giggles I reformatted and reinstalled mountain lion on my old drive put it back in the macbook and it worked great until ..... you guessed it I INSTALLED OFFICE!! Thought I got a bad drive so I bought a 7200rpm 1 tera bite but it in a cradle and booted from it my system worked perfect till I installed office now my macbook won't even boot in safemode.

Coincidence? Or Office 2011 is causing it?

3 different drives, 1 Office Suite. What do you think?

Use LibreOffice instead.

I think we have the symptoms nailed. If you are willing to turn off Time Machine, there's a 95% chance you will escape.

Regarding Libre office, I looked at it and decided not to use it. I just want to reiterate that I was very pleased with Nisus Writer Pro. It is amazingly compatible with Word documents (via RTF format is the easiest, but it will also read .doc documents). It's also well engineered, and has fewer bugs overall than Word. You might want to give it a look in addition to Libre Office.

Any news on this issue? Its been ignored for yonkers, and its as serious as it gets. Dissapointed in both Apple and Microsoft here.

This is still a serious problem!

I had to restore my Macbook Pro twice (thanks to time machine) last week after heavy Word 2011 (40MB) files with images caused the exact bug reported. Still using Lion, does Mountain Lion help? Will Mavericks?

This is a very serious problem, come on Apple and Microsoft, please work together to solve both shortterm (just a change how Wor copies it backups should fix it) and longterm. An app like Word should not be able to crash the whole filesystem completely!

Danish_Dan wrote:

Any news on this issue? Its been ignored for yonkers, and its as serious as it gets. Dissapointed in both Apple and Microsoft here.

Have you told Apple and Microsoft?

Posting here doesn't tell either of them anything.

Have you tried OpenOffice or NeoOffice to see if they make any difference?

Allan

I don't think either of them give a **** - too busy trying to sell us the next thing.

I save all larger documents in Word 97-2004, which seems to work - which means that the price of the later Office product was mainly wasted money.

I have also tried Nisus wroter pro, which works well but unfortunately the world got sucked into office and therefore Word is important.

What a pathetic shambles from both parties

Well I am glad to see that you at least tried something else besides Word. To me that seems to place more of the blame in Microsofts court. I was not suggestion the other word processor as solutions more as test.

Allan

Word just attempted to do this to me again the other day, but obviously some way that my mac is differently set up now stopped it doing an unrepairable disk corruption.

Working in a very large word document, A3 size, 60 figures, 180mb. Time Machine was disabled. Autorecover disabled.

Word couldn't save, citing a 'disk corruption' issue, console read thousands of messages generated by Word per second.

Disk utility wouldn't run in 'read only' mode. Restarted the Mac, Disk Utility munched away for quite a while, and thank goodness, managed to repair it. Computer was glitchy for a couple of days until I reset the PRAM/NVRAM.

Something different to when I had the entire disk corrupted twice before meant that it was able to recover the disk.

Variables to when I had this previously:

- Filevault 2 switched on

- Mavericks, compared to Mountain Lion

- New logic board (changed due to video glitches)

- 8 gb ram, compared to 4gb previously

- Time machine, autorecover switched off

You do realize that this thread has been dead for nearly two years, don't you?