Why is Microsoft Word pasting a thousand pages of copied text?

April 26, 2005 3:02 PM

I'm asking on behalf of a fellow law student who is having a big, fat laptop problem as we fast approach the zero our for our finals. She copies some lines of text in Microsoft Word. When she pastes them, Word pastes literally a thousand pages of the same lines of text into the document. This isn't happening in any other programs, but her computer does seem to be running pretty hot for no reason that we can discern. What the hell is going on?

It's an HP Pavilion laptop running Windows XP home and Office XP. We ran AdAware and SpyBot (thus reaching the limits of my Windows troubleshooting skills) and that didn't fix it.

posted by jennyb to computers & internet (7 comments total)

Does it matter how she pastes it (i.e. control-V, right click > paste, edit >paste, etc)?
posted by willnot at 3:23 PM on April 26, 2005

Word has a command, Repeat Paste (Control Y). I would check to make sure those keys aren't stuck or something like that.
posted by willnot at 3:27 PM on April 26, 2005

Anyone great with dealing with Microsoft Word problems? It's adding thousands of blank pages to my document! Please help...I'm in the middle of writing my thesis...
posted by matteo at 3:52 PM on April 26, 2005

If you can't find a solution in time, there is Open Office.
posted by Mean Mr. Bucket at 3:59 PM on April 26, 2005

Is it only a problem pasting into a particular document? If so, that document is corrupt. There's no consistent way to fix it other than copying out all the text, using "Paste Special" to paste it as plain text into an entirely new document and then manually reapplying all the styles.
posted by krisjohn at 6:26 PM on April 26, 2005

has she had the exam software installed on her laptop? part of the purpose of the exam software is to inhibit the cut-n-paste function. it's only supposed to do it while the exam program is running, but i know the exam software they used while i was in law school (sorry, i don't recall the name) created lots of problems for people.

my law school had tech guys on call during exams to troubleshoot problems related to the exam software (and had loaner laptops just in case). she should go to the registrar first thing tomorrow to find out what her options are regarding laptop problems and exams.
posted by crush-onastick at 7:36 PM on April 26, 2005

What krisjohn and willnot said, or try copying and pasting it into Notepad, then copying and pasting from Notepad into the Word doc.
posted by mkdg at 10:32 PM on April 26, 2005