Windows XP and word 2002 refuse to recognize changes on a document made on a different machine.

March 30, 2012 4:39 AM

Windows XP and word 2002 refuse to recognize changes on a document made on a different machine. What gives?

I composed a document on Machine A (Windows XP and Word 2002). I put it on a thumb drive. I moved it to Machine B (Windows Seven, Office 2010 saved as Word 2002) and worked on it there. I saved it to that same thumb drive, returned it to Machine A -

Machine A does not recognize any of the changes.

Wait, it gets worse. I return to Machine B, open a fresh Word document, give it a new unrelated name, copy and paste all the material, save it as Word 2002, return again to Machine A, open it - it comes back with old unchanged document.

Yes, I rebooted the machine.

It wouldn't matter except that I've got an old printer that machine B cannot connect to. That, and the precedent.

Thoughts, advice, solutions, painful memories? It's all welcome

posted by IndigoJones to computers & internet (7 answers total)

Have you worked with the two machines without incident before? Has something on either machine changed recently?

Backwards compatibility is not a strong-suit of MS Word. Could you use LibreOffice or Google Docs?

Failing that try saving the document as an RTF when shuttling between the machines.
posted by oddman at 5:05 AM on March 30, 2012

Did you eject the thumb drive properly? Or is it possible that none of your changes were ever saved?

To rule out other kinds of odd user error, you could try opening a fresh document, new and unrelated name, type in "Hi IndigoJones", save, return to Machine A and check that you get what you expect.

If that works, then you might like to try pasting your original content via some other app (Notepad would be a good first try). Yes, you'll lose some formatting. But you'll learn something more about the problem.

Or you could try "saving as" some even older format e.g. RTF.
posted by emilyw at 5:19 AM on March 30, 2012

Not a permanent fix by any stretch of the imagination, but how about printing the correct document to PDF on the working computer and shuttling that over to the one that can actually physically print?
posted by bcwinters at 5:28 AM on March 30, 2012

Word and USB drives will sometimes collide and conspire to lose or corrupt your work. Make sure you always save Word files to the hard drive and then close Word completely and copy the file to the USB stick using Windows explorer.
posted by Lanark at 6:05 AM on March 30, 2012

RTF to the rescue! Easy when you know, which I didn't. or was too stupid to figure out, so yet again, I owe you all. Had it not worked, PDF would be the next stop.

Lanark, interesting and I can believe it. Weird part was, though, that the USB stick would read correctly on one machine and not on the other. It was like there was some burly gatekeeper on the old machine that would not allow the new and improved version access and no matter how it tried to disguise itself with new names, would force it to take off the top hat and zoot suit. It was the fact that he could see through and cold shoulder other names at all that creeped me out.

But - RTF foxed him.

I really must get a new machine one of these days.

Thanks to all
posted by IndigoJones at 6:48 AM on March 30, 2012

it comes back with old unchanged document

Well, that bit was remarkable, to where I'm unsure you're telling it right or fully certain of what happened. Anyhoo.

The other stuff can easily be laid at the structure of Word documents, which especially when advanced author/history features are enabled, can be somewhat complex, and affects the whole backwards compatibility issue. Which is to say, I suspect that a Word guru (which I was more or less at one point) could have retrieved your newer version somehow, but the settings on the two different Words, or something about the compatibility settings, were being recalcitrant.

RTF, though, is a more general standard that shouldn't generally confuse any word processing software. It's usually a better fallback for file transfer for that reason, even if the business world defaults to .doc -- but that's more for training/ease reasons than anything technical.
posted by dhartung at 12:28 PM on March 30, 2012

Are you tracking changes on one, and viewing 'original without markup' on the other?
posted by obiwanwasabi at 12:26 AM on March 31, 2012