Things to Avoid!
Everything has its limits, including Word. Documents corrupt when the internal structure of the document becomes so complex that Word cannot read its own handwriting.
Here are some good working practices that will reduce the incidence of these problems:
- Don't try to hurry Word. It often needs to complete an internal process before it can move on. This is important if you make changes to large parts of the text or perform a find/replace.
- Don't get too aggressive with dragging and dropping. Drag and drop should never be used between documents, and only carefully in tables. Dragging whole rows is generally safe; dragging cells is not.
- Avoid tables or large graphics in running headers or footers.
- Take care editing the paragraphs immediately adjacent to a table or a heading, particularly if you are using numbering.
- Work carefully with section breaks; they are internally very complex and can damage the whole document if they corrupt.
- Take care not to leave Track Changes on when you don't need it. Accept all changes before beginning a new version of a document.
- Don't be careless with Master Documents. For more information on why Master Documents corrupt, click here.
- Avoid the Document Map, which also tends to corrupt documents. Use Outline View instead.
- Don't use Versions.
- In versions of Word older than Word X, Allow Fast Saves (Preferences> Save) was a common cause of document corruption. Turn it OFF and leave it off. Instead, get used to saving often (Command> s) and, as an extra precaution, turn on Always Make Backup which makes a backup copy of your document as it existed when you first opened it for the current work session, and updates that backup to the previous version each time you save. In more recent versions of Word, Allow Fast Saves is effectively disabled – Word automatically disables it every tenth save of the document, and it is never allowed when saving to network drives.
For more information you may wish to read:
How Word differs from WordPerfect