Document Grew from 3 pages to 3000 page (2000)

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Happy Thursday to everyone!

I attempted a search here and couldn’t find an answer to this perplexing issue and was curious whether anyone else has experienced this issue and what a possible solution might be.

Last night an attorney at the firm where I work created a three page document. She opened the document this morning and it was now 3000 pages and growing, meaning more pages are being added.

I’ve see lots of strange problems with Word but have never seen this. I’m reaching here but is it possible the metadata ran awry causing this to happen or ??

TIA with any insight you might have.

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I was unclear of whether your post was a question seeking understanding, or a plea for help to stop it.

I’ll not add any value on the understanding front but have spent a lot of time stopping strangeness in Word.

I find that the first time a wierd problem happens it has usually been caused by an unexpected real-time event that will never repeat. Understanding the problem is not really necessary or cost-effective (I only track down an issue if it repeats for a different document)

Easy fixes are usually one of the following methods of shedding meta data or Word data structures:
– CUT whole content and PASTE to a new document
– save file as RTF file and reload
– save file as old word version (e.g. Word 95) and reload

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Andrew, thank you for your input. After typing my post I thought it would be a good idea to advise this user to save the document as .txt and to open it up in Notepad, then copy and paste the text into a new Word document and apply formatting, thus stripping away metadata .

I was hoping to obtain both an understanding and plea for help. In the eight years I’ve been using Word, nothing like this has ever happened. That said, I am fairly confident it won’t happen again. If I spent my time chasing all the little & big bugga-boos in Word I would never get any REAL work done!

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Hi Kathy:
Check out post 186240 for a possible explanation & cure.

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Thank you, Phil, for posting that and saving me from having to type it out again. This would be the very first thing I’d look at with these symptoms.

Lee Morgan

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Me too – now – I should have known there’d be someone around who knew the real explanation!

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Don’t feel bad – I spent a number of years working on a Help Desk for a law firm and we saw those symptoms over and over and over again. It was almost always Keep With Next and Keep Lines Together. Help Desk experience is a really, really good way to see all the things that people can think up to mess up their documents. And, boy, can they think them up!

Lee Morgan

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