Re: Question: Newsgroup for Help with MicroSoft Word?

[Dick Margulis <ampersandvirgule -at- WORLDNET -dot- ATT -dot- NET>]

Jennnifer,

Yes, there is a newsgroup, microsoft.public.word.applicationerrors, but
I have found it to be the next best thing to online help, which is to
say not terribly helpful at all.

Your coworker's situation crops up there often, however. I'll save you
the trouble of going to www.dejanews (the place to check if you have any
more Word problems) by summarizing the stock advice that is the mantra
of that group:

1.      If you don't have an up-to-date macro virus scanner installed, it's
your own damn fault and don't come whining to us (not the way it's
usually phrased, but it may as well be).

2.      Delete normal.dot (as Beth says) and try opening it again.

3.      Try to open it as an RTF or TXT file (losing all of your formatting
information along the way and assuming you didn't save it as a binary,
duh) and resaving it to a new document.

4.      Try recovering the last autosave version from the TEMP folder.

Of course these techniques don't actually work most of the time, but
they give you something to do while you're on hold for tech support ;-)

Dick



Jennifer Zilliac wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> One of my coworkers is having a major Word problem, and she has
> a 5:00 pm (PST) deadline. I don't know Word very well -- I use
> FrameMaker. Is there somewhere we can turn for help with
> MicroSoft Word?
>
> In case one of you can help, here's the problem. She has a
> four-page newsletter. She could only print the first two pages.
> Now, she can't even open the file because Word crashes when she
> attempts to open it. She thinks it has something to do with
> macros, but she really does't know what's wrong.
>
> She's running Word 97 on NT.
>
> Thanks so much for any help!!
>
> Jennifer
> --
> Jennifer Zilliac
> Technical Writer
> SmartDB Corporation
> http://www.smartdb.com
> mailto:jennifer -at- smartdb -dot- com
>