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Tom Hauwiller reports: <<I've created, from scratch via ASCII text and a
brand new template, a 230+ page software manual... After I distributed the
3rd review draft, I decided to try out the Word Revision Tracking feature to
collect
the input of the 8-10 reviewers for the final draft, which should have
needed only minor changes. The Word file size before I converted it to PDF
for the third draft was about 2 MB. When I began revising for the final
draft, I turned on the revision tracking feature and did a "Save As..." to
begin my work... After having revised only about 10 percent of the
manual, I now have 6 backup files whose sizes are 4.7 MB, 6.5 MB, 11 MB, 12
MB, 16 MB, 24 MB.>>
Revision tracking works just fine for most people, so that alone isn't
likely to be the problem. Two likely sources for this problem. The first is
easiest: Open the Tools menu, select Options, then click the Save tab.
Disable "fast saves", and never use it again. It's a recipe for disaster.
Resave the document under a new name, and the problem might go away. If not,
it's possible the file got moderately corrupted, perhaps because of the
"fast saves" feature--which is infamous for these things. If that's the
case, open the last version of the file you can open safely, and select
everything except the final paragraph marker. (If you can't see that marker,
turn it on in the Options dialog box you just worked in to disable fast
saves. Click the View tab, and enable paragraph markers.) Now copy the
selected text, paste it into a clean new document, then do a "save as".
Voila! You'll lose the visual marking of the tracked revisions, but the
document should now be intact.
--Geoff Hart, FERIC, Pointe-Claire, Quebec
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
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