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?

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).

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

Hello John,

I think that the Microsoft Team could work this issue. Is there a way to submit these comments to them?

Regards,

Muriel