Word 2007 "Contacting the server for Information. Press ESC to can

[Guest]

Word 2007’s "Contacting the server for Information. Press ESC to cancel."
feature frequency is making editing my document painful at best. A task that
should take 15 minutes to work on is literally increasing this task to over
an hour due to the frequency of this “contacting the server for informationâ€.
It takes three to four minutes to perform the update and is occurring every 2
minutes.

I have copied the document and all external files to my local system. I
have set the default printer to a PDF writer that is installed locally.
How can I disable this feature?

 

[Herb Tyson [MVP]]

When it happens, press Escape. It really should interrupt the process, and
should not harm the document.

The usual problem is that the template attached to the document is on a
network or internet location, rather than local. In the Developer tab, click
Document Template, and click the Attach button. Navigate to a local version
of the document template, and click Open. Once saved, the problem won't
recur for that document... unless you send it out for updates and someone
else reattaches their network-accessible template to it again.

 

[Guest]

Hi Herb,

I appreciate the suggestion, but I had all ready ensured that the "Document
Template" was local.

To stop the constant and frequent request to "Word 2007’s "Contacting the
server for Information. Press ESC to cancel." issue, I copied the word
document and all the include file graphs and charts to my local system. Then
manually disabled all my network connections. Once disconnected, the
annoying and painful request to connect ceased. Once I compeleted my changes,
in 5 minutes instead of hours, re-enabled my network connections and copied
the document and include files back onto the network share.

I ran into another issue where all the documents "Links to Files" do not
persist over opening, closing and opening of the document. All the charts
have been put into a subfolder from where the document path. All the links
are relative to the path of the document (i.e. charts/chart1.jpg,
charts/chart2.jpg, etc) but every time I open the document; what charts are
displayed successfully is random. All it takes to bring an image back is to
select the image, press and hold the shift key then press F9, right click the
field code, select "Edit Field code" then in the dialog box select OK.
Making no changes, but forcing a refresh. The path shown in the box is a
relative path such as charts/chart1.jpg)

Regards,
Steve

 

[Guest]

Hi Herb,

I appreciate the suggestion, but I had all ready ensured that the "Document
Template" was local.


To stop the constant and frequent request to "Word 2007’s "Contacting the
server for Information. Press ESC to cancel." I copied the word document and
the folder with all the include file graphs and charts to my local system.
Then manually disabled all my network connections. Once disconnected, the
annoying and painful request to connect ceased. Once completed, enabled my
network connection and copied all the files back to the network.


I ran into another issue where all the documents "Links to Files" do not
persist over opening, closing and opening of the document. All the charts
have been put into a subfolder from where the document path lies. All the
links are relative to the path of the word document (i.e. charts/chart1.jpg,
charts/chart2.jpg, etc) but every time I open the document; what charts are
displayed successfully is random. All it takes to bring the image back is to
select the image, press and hold the shift key then press F9, right click the
field code, select "Edit Field code" then in the dialog box select OK.
Making no changes, but forcing a refresh. The path shown in the box is a
relative path such as charts/chart1.jpg.


Regards,
Steve

 

[dbirdz]

If you are in Word 2007 there are 2 more effective solutions.

Solution per document:
click in the Office Button -> Prepare -> Inspect Document -> Inspect -> Document properties and personal information -> Remove All

Solution for your user account (ie. applies to all documents you open but does not affect other users):
Office Button -> Word Options -> Advanced -> General -> uncheck the "Update check connections at the opening" and to prevent Word to automatically update links when a file is printed Office Button -> Word Options -> Display -> Printing options -> clear the check box "Update data related before printing".