WORD Frustration – ‘There are too many edits . . .

Topic

New Reply

Hi All,

I’ve been torpedoed by Word! I have a 45 page document that actually contains about 750+ live links to an excel worksheet. I have just started having two major problems.

1) When trying to move anything within the document, I get the error message “There are too many edits in the document . . . ”

2) Table of Contents no longer works. I get one of two error messages – either “Table of contents entries not found” or “Word does not have enough memory . . .”

I have followed MS’s useless suggestions re: clearing temp space, etc. I have now tried to work on the document on two differnt machines – one with 1 GB of RAM. 500 MB free – 14 GB of disk free – the other with 3 GB RAM and and 375 GB of free disk space.

Does anyone know of a work-around for this?
MS Office – “Enterprise Software” – my foot!!

Thanks in advance!

Reply | Quote

Replies

750 links to Excel probably requires too much memory. Disk space is not relevant here. Can you set the links to manual updating, or break the links?

Reply | Quote

Hi Hans,

Thanks for the response. The document updates the spredsheet links just fine. Even when I open the document without updating the links, I have the same problem with the TOC and trying to move anything within the document..

Reply | Quote

Can you post the document, or is it too large and/or confidential?
Perhaps look at the fields (Alt+F9) and bookmarks (Insert > Bookmarks, make sure that the option to display hidden bookmarks is checked).
Then try to make sense of them. Maybe there’s a lot of hidden bookmarks (or fields) where you’d only expect one?

Say if the problem is with the hidden _TOC bookmarks that Word has inserted for the TOC entries, you might delete them with a macro, and rebuild the TOC:

Dim myBM As Bookmark
For Each myBM In ActiveDocument.Bookmarks
  If UCase(left(myBM.Name, 4)) = "_TOC" Then
    myBM.Delete
  End If
Next myBM

‘ then update the TOC with F9 to re-generate the TOC bookmarks
Also make sure you don’t have “Tracked changes” turned on, or try to accept all changes if there are any. And don’t use “versions” (Save as > Version) in case you did.

Klaus

Reply | Quote

Klause
As an aside; is this general guidance, or specific to this thread?
[indent]

---

And don’t use “versions” (Save as > Version)

---

[/indent]

Reply | Quote

Klaus will have to give a definitive answer.

In Things to Avoid (on the Word MVP site), use of Versions is named among the features to avoid. An explanation is given here.

Reply | Quote

Thanks Hans

Reply | Quote

No, you caught me. I don’t really know much about “Save as version”, but usually when you hear about the feature, you hear about problems.

Klaus

Reply | Quote

Thanks Klaus,

I’ll try this. I appreciate the help.

Reply | Quote

Hi Bill,

Here’s an MSKB article that might help:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?…kb;en-us;224029%5B/url%5D

Cheers

Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Reply | Quote

Hi macpropod,

Thanks for the article – I had already found this. Unfortunately it was of no help. I did find a solution though, that may be of interest to everyone. Its an add-in for word call “Cross-Eyes” from Levitt & James. It reveals all of word’s formatting codes and allows you to find the problems that are very difficult or impossible to find using just word’s built-in tools. It allowed me to find what word identified as “too many edits” and now my document is workable again.

Thanks again, to all for their help!!

Reply | Quote