MS Office for Mac - Word Keeps Crashing

In the past three days my Word has crashed 4 times, just freezing leaving me with a Beach Ball spinning. I have an early '09 IMac w/ 16 G of Ram using Mountain Lion and MS Office '11. I have not had this happen before and each time is was when I had copied and was about to paste onto a Word doc. The first time it cost me two hours of work lost but since I have gotten smarter and saved more often.

Anyone have a solution for me?

No specific solution but I do have two hints for you:

1. Open Word Preferences, Save, and select "Always make a backup". Then go into your document location selection and choose your "Documents" folder for the backup file.

2. When you paste, try selecting "Paste Special" instead of the usual Control V or clicking on the clipboard. This has worked for some folks who have had the same problem as you when pasting. And make sure that your Office is up to date. (14.4.5)

Thanks Chsag for the advice, will do!

Roger

Chsag,

I have noticed that it seems to be limited to when I copy text from a website and try to paste it into a doc that is already open that it freezes up. But not the first time I do this but maybe the second time and I usually do use 'paste special' as most of what I get is SSDI (Social Security Death Indexes).

I'll have to experiment a bit and see what I can come up with. I rarely paste anything from web sites into an open document. I have pasted very large presentations from the web into Powerpoint when it was open without difficulty.

How much system memory do you have? Word is notorious for sucking up memory especially if you have a lot of graphics in a document or the document is lengthy. You stated that you're pasting SSDIs into Word from the web. Aren't they in PDF format? Importing PDF documents into Word does cause problems.

Chsag,

For more than tens years now I have been collecting Obits and SSDI's and filling them into a Word Doc and then into another Word doc under several categories, always copy and paste with every Obit and SSDI, more than 7,000 so far. The doc I am using now has 125 pages and only a few ( 4 -5 ) small pics. I have 16 Gigs of Ram, but it rarely feels like it, like now as slow as I type, it sometimes takes a few secs for letters to appear on screen. And my SSDI's are not in pdf, they're from an Obit service on the net. I could send you a copy of this doc but I believe that it is my machine that's the problem.

A hardware problem could definitely cause crashes and hang ups. Have you run a check on your hard drive lately? Your iMac is a 2009 model which means it's around 5 years old. Not real old by any means, but hard drives and optical drives do not last forever.

Use Disk Utility from your recovery partition to verify the hard drive to see if there are any errors that show up. Also, a Word 125 page document might also slow things down somewhat although you stated you have 16 GB of memory which certainly should be enough.