Dec
9
2003

macword bug

I think Word for Mac hates me. Since I started at Georgetown, I’ve been writing my papers for class mainly on my office Mac (not necessarily at the office; ah, the joys of laptops). However, I’ve had a number of papers sidelined just before deadline with a bizarre — and incredibly frustrating — bug in Word. I’m not sure what causes it — maybe it has something to do with my tendancy to save my work every couple words, or every time I pause to think — but at some point, usually after the file has been opened and edited for several hours, I’ll get an error message (either “Word cannot complete the operation because too many files are open.” or “The disk is full. Free some space on this drive, or save the document on another disk. Try one or more of the following: * Close any unneeded documents, programs, and windows. * Save the document on another disk.”). I’ve seen this bug also disable the “print” function.

It’s incredibly maddening to have this happen, as it inevitably does for me, just before I have to turn in a paper.

After doing some poking around Google, I’m relieved to find out that I’m not the only one who has experienced this problem — but unnerved to learn that this is apparently a longstanding bug in Word for Mac, one that’s existed since the days of OS 9 and before.

From Betalogue:
• “Word X Experiment - ‘Disk Is Full’ bug” - 03/24/03
• “Word X: Too many files open” - 06/18/03

On a related note, I want this t-shirt for so many reasons.

Posted at 12:13 PM in school, technology

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Comments

GRR, I just started having this problem myself, why the heck can’t they fix this!! :o(. *SO* glad I migrated to a Mac just in time for thesis….sigh.

Posted by The Girl on December 9, 2003 8:05 PM

Just got this annoying message and nearly had a heart attack. A workaround is to “Save as…” RTF and then “Save as…” Microsoft Word Document.

Posted by Rob D on September 14, 2004 1:48 PM

From my own experience, the “Save as … RTF” option works great for basic documents, and is a wonderful workaround. My problems with saving to RTF usually involved footnotes, which would be lost or no longer classified as footnotes after the conversion.

Posted by alykat on September 15, 2004 12:29 AM

Rick Schaut, a Microsoft developer, wrote a lengthy yet fascinating explanation of how this bug works, where it came from and how it ultimately was identified. (“Anatomy of a Software Bug” - 05/19/04) He closes with this bit of advice:

In any event, if you’ve stayed with me long enough, here’s a tip you can use until we release an SR of Word X (or earlier) with this fix. If you have a document that has headers and footers with page fields in them, do your editing in Normal view, and you’ll likely never hit the “Disk is full” save error.

(Link found via a thread at forums.macrumors.com.)

Posted by alykat on December 23, 2004 10:19 PM

Hi, I am getting this error message regardless of what file I am using or how long it has been open for.

Do you know of a fix for this? If I ‘save as’ another document name it works fine but this means having hundreds of documents and is very time consuming!

Thanks,
Mark

Posted by Mark on November 8, 2007 6:29 AM

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