04-24-2012, 04:26 AM

Hello,
I'm new to this forum so forgive if I'm posting a much repeated thread or in the wrong place! I've got an iMac running 10.5.8 and Office 2008.
Everything was working fine(ish) with Word until yesterday when the following message appeared as I tried to save an unremarkable Word document:

'Word cannot save or create this file. The disk may be full or write-protected.Try one of the following:
*free more memory
*make sure that the disk you want to save the file on is not full, write-protected or damaged.'

Well, as a humble writer I'm pretty technologically challenged, but I googled this and found what seems to be the standard advice from Microsoft of emptying Office2008autorecovery; checking the hard drive name, and checking permissions. I've done the first 2 but to no avail. I don't know how to 'check permissions', but seems unlikely to be this as I'm not part of a network and haven't knowingly altered any permissions.
The only thing I can think of was that the original text I was trying to save as a Word Doc was copied from a google docs file, but I'm sure I've done that before.
Any ideas or advice would be much appreciated, as I'm really not sure what to try next, and I desperately need to be able to use Word (two books to finish by end of May!)

04-24-2012, 01:15 PM

Sometimes Microsoft error messages can be deceptive. (so what's new?) It appears that you may have copied something from Google Docs that is locked. I work with Google Docs quite often and unless you have specific permissions to alter or copy the content you may get a permission error. I'm not sure if that's the reason you're getting that particular error, but it sounds like it might be.

But just in case it's not the reason, you can verify permissions by booting your Mac with the original install disk and then run a permissions check from Disk Utility.