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Kirk Turner said...
>
> [snip]
>
> This morning I think I have found the problem. This manual is meant to
> be both a reconciliation and an upgrade to an existing patchwork
system
> of contracts and old manuals that don't address all of the current
> issues facing capital construction in my state. The "authors," who are
> the top architects and construction managers in the state, evidently
cut
> and pasted major sections of the old contracts and manuals into their
> sections. Sometimes the paste WAS their section. When I put the manual
> together I turned on the "Styles" pane, and saw hundreds of styles in
> use from the old contracts and manuals. I think that the combination
of
> the multitude of styles and the size of the document has overwhelmed
my
> computer. Every time Word crashes, I open the document or recover it,
> and some of the styles have reverted to their previous state
throughout
> the entire document, and I have to begin anew even though I have
> acquired the habit of saving the document at a compulsive rate since
the
> crashes began--makes no difference. I can't get through 30 pages
without
> Word crashing
>
> [snip]
>
> Should I just paste the entire thing to WordPad and start from
scratch?
> I tried that once, and Word crashed yet again and couldn't complete
the
> paste. I tried deleting the styles, and the manual became
> incomprehensible and even more unstable. Is there a simple solution (I
> wish) to this? If I could just stabilize Word, I could do this . . .
> maybe. All I need is a polished first draft by Monday to show the
> Governor's people. If you were in my shoes, what would you do? My Word
> program is an OEM, and I don't have the disk. And please don't suggest
> that I read the riot act to someone; I don't have the leverage.
>
It's been a long time since I've worked on anything that size in Word.
At first blush I think you may need to "dumb-down" even from your
proposed WordPad solution, and go all the way to NotePad (though I don't
think that tool has the horsepower you need). You might want to take the
whole document (either a section at a time or the entire thing if you
have a tool with enough space) and dump it as an un-formatted, plain
text output to strip out all the garbage that multiple users have put
in.
Then build yourself a blank template in Word with only the styles you
need, and import the plain text piece by piece. You can choose to add
the formatting as you go or after you get everything in.
Like I said, I don't know if NotePad can support enough characters to
fit a document of that size (I've had it tell me it can't support
documents that are too long before). But I think you need to eliminate
_all_ formatting from your text to avoid any goofy things getting pulled
into your new document.
I wish you luck!
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