Preventing corruption from switching versions (97 and later)

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Hey,
I assume this must be an easy question as probably everyone gets involved in this sooner or later, but I didn’t easily find useful documentation about this..
Does anyone know a *solid* way to prevent Word documents from getting corrupt when used in different versions?

For example, at work we use Office 97 but I want to be able to continue with the documents at home , on my portable with Office XP, and back in 97 at the office. In my experience almost every serious document seems to become corrupt (say cheese to Dr. Watson) and highly unstable. The same happens occasionally with documents we receive from clients, as you can’t recognise the version they originate from.

On the www I found a useful document on http://www.mocomsystems.com/pdfs/shuffle.pdf%5B/url%5D but I don’t know if it’s applicable to Office XP too.

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As far as I can see, everything in the pdf applies to Word 2002 vs Word 97 too.

Additional new features in Word 2002 (to be avoided if you want to remain compatible with Word 97) are:

• Diagrams
• Smart tags (uncheck Smart Tags in the Save tab of the Tools | Options… dialog)
• Digital signatures
  [/list]Word VBA also has new features. Be careful when writing code on XP; see “What’s new” in the online help.

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As far as I can see, everything in the pdf applies to Word 2002 vs Word 97 too.

Additional new features in Word 2002 (to be avoided if you want to remain compatible with Word 97) are:

• Diagrams
• Smart tags (uncheck Smart Tags in the Save tab of the Tools | Options… dialog)
• Digital signatures
  [/list]Word VBA also has new features. Be careful when writing code on XP; see “What’s new” in the online help.

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> almost every serious document seems to become corrupt

If by serious you mean that it has been edited and edited and saved and saved over a long period of time, it might be a good prophylatic to copy its contents (except the final paragraph mark) into a new (Word 97) document from time to time. The internal structure of Word documents is complicated and does occasionally get messed up for no good reason. On the other hand, if by serious you mean it has a lot of embedded objects or tables, the foregoing advice goes double for those.

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Thanks, both!
By ‘serious’ I meant ‘with some structure’ but I admit this is relative, as it’s also always hard to know when the document actually gets corrupt (*). But to be more precise: I thougt about: a document containing stuff like formatted chapter headings (whether of not with specific styles), some listing/numbering perhaps, and/or some (not even with too many jingle bells decorated) tables. But this doesn’t even have to go that far… (Even the number of pages doesn’t matter, I guess, but, say, it ‘ll mostly be exceeding five …) So I’ll keep jscher’s tip in mind (especially reminding NOT to copy that final paragraph mark!). Essentially all this will also be availabie in the important document I’m going to use in both 97 and XP right now.
Well, that’s it. I’m going for it… or holding the wood as we say (‘hout vasthouden’ in Dutch)… I’ll let you know if I get some more tips from elsewhere…
Hasse
(*) THAT might be a nice Word feature/option for the next Office version: let Word check important corruption risk sensitive features in the active document. Option one: corruption candidate elements counter. Option 2: when such element is detected, show a warning message like ‘woops, feature … on page … paragraph… showed some indications of emerging corruption behaviour. Please click ‘OK’ to copy the content of this document (except the final paragraph mark) to a new one and replace the old with this new document. This is advisory, even though you’ll lose some document properties. Click ‘cancel’ when you’re a more adventurous person fond of heading into a more surpriseful journey.”

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Thanks, both!
By ‘serious’ I meant ‘with some structure’ but I admit this is relative, as it’s also always hard to know when the document actually gets corrupt (*). But to be more precise: I thougt about: a document containing stuff like formatted chapter headings (whether of not with specific styles), some listing/numbering perhaps, and/or some (not even with too many jingle bells decorated) tables. But this doesn’t even have to go that far… (Even the number of pages doesn’t matter, I guess, but, say, it ‘ll mostly be exceeding five …) So I’ll keep jscher’s tip in mind (especially reminding NOT to copy that final paragraph mark!). Essentially all this will also be availabie in the important document I’m going to use in both 97 and XP right now.
Well, that’s it. I’m going for it… or holding the wood as we say (‘hout vasthouden’ in Dutch)… I’ll let you know if I get some more tips from elsewhere…
Hasse
(*) THAT might be a nice Word feature/option for the next Office version: let Word check important corruption risk sensitive features in the active document. Option one: corruption candidate elements counter. Option 2: when such element is detected, show a warning message like ‘woops, feature … on page … paragraph… showed some indications of emerging corruption behaviour. Please click ‘OK’ to copy the content of this document (except the final paragraph mark) to a new one and replace the old with this new document. This is advisory, even though you’ll lose some document properties. Click ‘cancel’ when you’re a more adventurous person fond of heading into a more surpriseful journey.”

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> almost every serious document seems to become corrupt

If by serious you mean that it has been edited and edited and saved and saved over a long period of time, it might be a good prophylatic to copy its contents (except the final paragraph mark) into a new (Word 97) document from time to time. The internal structure of Word documents is complicated and does occasionally get messed up for no good reason. On the other hand, if by serious you mean it has a lot of embedded objects or tables, the foregoing advice goes double for those.

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