Word 2004 Document Won't Save

December 6, 2007 7:24 PM

Emergency Tech Support: Microsoft Word 2004 for Mac has suddenly become unable to save a document. It says "Too many files are open. Please close a window." Then "Saving the autorecovery file is postponed." Then "Too many files are open. Please close a window." Then "Word has insufficient memory. Would you like to save your document as Rescued Document X?" Nothing works. There's plenty of hard drive space. There are no other open documents. What's going on?

Creating a new document doesn't work - it won't allow that to save either. Trying to save to a USB drive won't work. Any ideas?

posted by Dasein to computers & internet (27 comments total)

More information: we've avoided saving the document as a Rescued Document for fear that it won't properly recover.
posted by Dasein at 7:26 PM on December 6, 2007

The issue isn't hard drive space, it's RAM. Word is detecting that you don't have enough for it to do its thing. My first step would be to try rebooting, not starting up anything else, and trying to start Word then. If that works, it probably just means you have ten Firefox windows open or something that are munching up your system resources. If it's still not working when your system has just restarted - hmm. I'll leave that to others and go google to see if I find you anything better.
posted by crinklebat at 7:27 PM on December 6, 2007

A couple things:

Can you cut and paste it into an email message to send it to yourself?

Can you print? Worse comes to worse you can OCR it later.

Do you have any web pages or other open documents open in the background? Try closing them to free up some "free file handles", you may free up enough to allow you to save the word document.
posted by bottlebrushtree at 7:28 PM on December 6, 2007

Oh, is it that you really, really want your open document to be saved? Yikes. Try shutting down all running programs and check your processes to make sure there isn't some crappy Mac port with memory leaks that's hosing your memory, I suppose.
posted by crinklebat at 7:28 PM on December 6, 2007

The problem with cutting and pasting is that we'd lose all the footnotes. (We being my girlfriend.)

No printer around, unfortunately.

Just closed all the other programs, still not working.

crinkelbat, we don't want to restart (or close Word) because we're afraid of losing everything since the last autosave.
posted by Dasein at 7:30 PM on December 6, 2007

DO NOT REBOOT, YOU WILL LOSE YOUR DOCUMENT!
posted by bottlebrushtree at 7:31 PM on December 6, 2007

Yes, sorry crinkelbat, should have been clearer: the reason this is an emergency is that there's an open document and the potential to lose a few hours of work since the last save.
posted by Dasein at 7:32 PM on December 6, 2007

Okay, no reboot. I wasn't even going to close Word.
posted by Dasein at 7:33 PM on December 6, 2007

Have you tried saving in other formats? I think that probably won't help, but worth a shot. Did you take a look at running processes? It looks like this is a famous bug in Mac Word, which makes me nervous for your girlfriend, but I'm looking into whether there's anything you can do.
posted by crinklebat at 7:37 PM on December 6, 2007

It's less than ideal as a save strategy, for a number of reasons, but I wonder if you can "Print to PDF" and choose "Print to File" as your printer. You won't be able to directly manipulate the result in Word, but you'll have a file with the contents, and you'll be able to strip the text with various PDF tools.
posted by paulsc at 7:38 PM on December 6, 2007

The process that Word is running in believes that it has opened the maximum number of files that it is allowed to open. Unless you have a bunch of files open simultaneously in Word, this is likely the result of a known bug.

The only suggestion I can think of is to print your doc to a PDF file (if it will let you), kill Word, and bring the doc back up to date by hand using the PDF file as a reference.
posted by tkolar at 7:38 PM on December 6, 2007

"Memory" refers to RAM. Close any and all programs aside from Word, including Firefox (AskMeFi isn't going anywhere!). If programs are being difficult in closing, press Apple-Option-Esc to open the Force-Quit dialog box and close programs that way.

You'll want only Word and Finder left open. If the error persists, Word itself is being a hog. Try closing other documents besides the crucial one, close any "helper" buddies that Word decided were necessary, etc.
posted by explosion at 7:42 PM on December 6, 2007

paulsc, we did manage to output it to a PDF, and we'll do that periodically, so at least the changes won't be lost. Thank you.
posted by Dasein at 7:44 PM on December 6, 2007

So there's no way to convert a PDF back to a Word document, complete with footnotes, is there?

If not, it's not crucial - she can finish this paper in Word, output it to a PDF and print it, since it's due in the morning in any event.

Thank you all for your help.

(For the record, I told her when she bought the thing to put 1GB in there!)
posted by Dasein at 7:47 PM on December 6, 2007

I've dealt with this many times before. It's because of a Mac/MS word problem that has since been resolved in newer versions of OS X. If you make too many in-document edits and then save them, it causes some kind of weird conflict that won't allow you to save the document. Something to do with the program believing you are creating new windows every time you save that aren't being closed.

The long and the short of it is that you are going to have to copy all that work to Simple Text and save that document. Then force quit your MS word, which will indeed possibly jettison your information. Start Word back up again. Cut and paste the lost information from Simple Text to your old document. If that doesn't work for you, you can always download an MS Word information recovery program from versiontracker.

Now, here's the other thing. If when you hit "Apple S" as you edit, you actually close the window every once in a while afterwards, this problem won't occur. Here is a blurb explaining why.


http://lists.apple.com/archives/client-management/2005/Nov/msg00264.html
posted by Lieber Frau at 7:48 PM on December 6, 2007

Wow, it's 1995 again!

Copy and paste into a new TextEdit document will do it.
posted by unSane at 7:56 PM on December 6, 2007

unSane: seriously. It's been a long time since Word crapped out on me.

The reason we can't cut and paste into TextEdit is we'd lose the footnotes, which would take a long time to rebuild, re-italicize, etc. We're happy settling for regular PDF backups and just keeping Word open until this is all done, then losing the Word file.
posted by Dasein at 7:58 PM on December 6, 2007

Maybe after she's finished, she should look at changing to a better word processor. Lessons learned, etc.

My wife loves Pages for her academic papers.
posted by Sukiari at 8:13 PM on December 6, 2007

"... We're happy settling for regular PDF backups and just keeping Word open until this is all done, then losing the Word file."
posted by Dasein at 10:58 PM on December 6

If she hasn't got far to go, that may work. But in my experience, once Word thinks it's memory bound in any respect, it's not too long before it quits on its own. Picking a point to gracefully exit, restart, and reconstruct the file with a fresh instance of Word might be her best strategy. And look at AutoSave options (maybe every 5 or 10 minutes?).
posted by paulsc at 8:34 PM on December 6, 2007

This whole problem started because it won't autosave, and when it tried to it gave her that message.

She'll just have to hope that it lasts until tomorrow without crapping out.
posted by Dasein at 8:43 PM on December 6, 2007

So, to be clear, is this a RAM problem or a Word problem? If Dasein's wife's computer had more RAM would this prevent the problem, delay the problem, or have no effect?
posted by Rumple at 9:47 PM on December 6, 2007

My understanding from above is that it would delay the problem, but it's a Word problem, so if it built up long enough, it could occur even with more RAM, though that would be unlikely (big difference between 512 and 1GB).

Oh, and she's my girlfriend, not my wife, though if AskMe keeps being this helpful, she just might decide she has to keep me around.
posted by Dasein at 10:14 PM on December 6, 2007

You're on OS X, right? The amount of physical memory in the system wouldn't make any difference at all (except in terms of speed). OS X is much better at the whole virtual-memory thing than OS 9 and previous were.

It sounds like a Word problem— it's leaking memory, or filehandles, or something, and it's either running into a per-process limit, or it thinks it is.
posted by hattifattener at 10:48 PM on December 6, 2007

I'm actually not sure if this will work in your situation, but if you can quit out of Word without needing to force-quit, you can select-all, copy, and quit Word. Word will pop up a dialog saying something like "you have a large amount of text on the clipboard, do you want to save it?"—click Yes.

Then relaunch Word and paste into a new document. Everything will come through.

If you're worried about reconstructing footnotes, it would be prudent also to copy the body text and footnotes into separate documents in Textedit, just as a backup in case you need to reconstruct the document.
posted by adamrice at 7:08 AM on December 7, 2007

I had this happen to me with a very important large document last year - it's a Word problem, and extra RAM would not have helped, as this was on my G5 that has more than 1 GB RAM.

Honestly, as others have said, instead of trying to proceed while printing to PDF, it's going to be safest to just bite the bullet and shut down Word, then reconstruct.
posted by needled at 8:39 AM on December 7, 2007

The reason we can't cut and paste into TextEdit is we'd lose the footnotes

But you can cut and paste, right? Just need a more capable app to paste into? Try AbiWord, OpenOffice.org/NeoOffice, or the Pages trial version. Surely at least one of them is capable of preserving the text and footnotes in a more editable format than PDF.
posted by nakedcodemonkey at 10:45 AM on December 7, 2007

A couple more alternatives if those didn't work: NisusWrite trial version, ThinkFree Desktop trial version, Mellel ($35 if this is for school), or MarinerWrite ($49)
posted by nakedcodemonkey at 11:19 AM on December 7, 2007