Word for Mac 2011 keeps crashing every time I work with a document, relatively large (50Mb), on MacBook Pro. When I work at the same document, in iMac, there is no problem. What could it be?

John

My issue is the same that he described... Besides that, the order of problems is the same that he enlisted.

Best Regards,

Muriel

Hi John:

Your issue is completely different to Muriels :-)

You are suffering the "Can't Save" bug.  Microsoft is currently trying to find the cause of this one (I know this because I am sitting ion the Microsoft offices in Redmond as we type...).

It appears to be a file deadlock, and yes, Time Machine could be the culprit (but there are several other possible sources of bother).  It appears to be worse in OS 10.7.

The only thing I can recommend as a work-around is:

1.  Every two or three hours (e.g. morning tea, lunchtime, afternoon tea) close and re-open Word.  This releases Word's hold on all the files it holds open when you are working.  Whenever you are editing a Word document, you have between 20 and 30 other temporary files open; these can run the OS X file system out of resources.
2.  At the finish of work each day, log out of your Mac.  This cleans up the memory and enabels certain house-keeping tasks.
3.  At the end of each week, shut the Mac down.  When you restart on Monday or whenever, OS X will completely clean p the memory and temporary files for you.

Hope this helps

Thank you, Daniel

I'll try this on one machine for a week and recomment.

Respectfully,

John

Thank you for the response, John

I'll do this for a week and recomment to this forum.

Respectfully,

John

Hi Muriel:

OK, the work-around to your issue is "Never leave Word open when suspending/pausing/sleeping the OS".

It should work, but it doesn't.  Because when Word re-starts, it instantly attempts to lock the 20 or 30 files it has open for each document.

The OS then gets very confused because some of the files already are locked...

So:  Your answer is "Quit Word before closing the lid."  If you do, you will not see this problem again.

Microsoft will try to make this "better" in service packs, but I would not want you to hope that this issue will ever completely go away.

Close Word, then close the lid :-)

Hope this helps

There is not much information I found, but it seems that Word is attempting to access a file that is being copied by Time Machine (the "another process").

Try setting up a work folder for your currenly-in-use files, then exclude it from Time Machine.

For safety, enable the backup option in Word > Preferences > Save. It's safer and more useful than AutoRecover.

And if you use the latter, set it for a longer interval (never 1 minute) and also exclude this folder: YOUR_USER_NAME (i.e., your home folder)/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Office 2011 AutoRecovery (this is where Word saves by default its AutoRecovery files).