Word 2007 document corruption

[yuhongbao_386]

In Word 2007, how often does Word documents corrupt compared to Word
2003 (for both the 97-2003 format and the new open xml format),
espscilly when using the document map, master documents, fast save, and
other features that have been known to corrupt word 2003 documents?

Yuhong Bao

 

[Jay Freedman]

Nobody knows yet what the frequency of corruption in Word 2007 is,
because it's too new.

I've never heard of the document map causing corruption. The Fast
Saves feature and the Revisions feature have been removed from the
program. The Master Document feature is still present, and I'm told
that some work was done to make it more reliable, but I don't have any
data about it.

One thing I find interesting is that the new XML format may make it
easier to recover from some kinds of corruption. Unlike the 97-2003
format, which is a single huge compound OLE container, the XML format
places individual features into separate XML files within the zip
container. If you know which feature is causing corruption, you can
just remove or replace that XML file and reopen the document. You
might have to redo some formatting, but the text of the document
should be intact.

For documents in 97-2003 format that you don't convert to XML, I'd
expect the same frequency of corrupt documents as before.

As an aside, my personal experience is that document corruption is
very rare if you avoid the features that are known offenders. I can
remember only one corrupted document in the last 5 years.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the
newsgroup so all may benefit.

 

[Yuhong Bao]

I realize the Document Map cause crashes in Word 2000 and earlier, not
corruption.

 

[Yuhong Bao]

One thing I find interesting is that the new XML format may make it
easier to recover from some kinds of corruption. Unlike the 97-2003
format, which is a single huge compound OLE container, the XML format
places individual features into separate XML files within the zip
container. If you know which feature is causing corruption, you can
just remove or replace that XML file and reopen the document. You
might have to redo some formatting, but the text of the document
should be intact.

Or if you are familar with the Open XML spec, you can try to fix the
corruption yourself.