Even though I currently work with Unix/Linux I use MS Office for my daily tasks.  You would think that I would use some variant of OpenOffice since this is available on the Linux workstations that I normally use.  My major complaint with Open/Libre office is they don’t support engineering notation.  That has been an issue for at least ten years and  I just gave up waiting for it. My other issue with the free office suites is lack of instant search which exists on MS Word 2010 and later.

So today I had issues with MS Word crashing that I almost asked to have my company laptop re-imaged.  However, just before I gave up I managed to mitigate the issues. The partial fix was to clear out all the template files , temporary files that Microsoft decides to strew all over your hard disk. Here are some places to delete your hidden files:

%appdata%\Microsoft\Template

%appdata%\Microsoft\Word\Startup

and of course your local documents folder.  There are temporary files for your documents.  These temp files have the pattern “~$*.do*”

And of course there is the very popular registry edits.  You can refer to them here: https://support.microsoft.com/kb/921541

The second part of the problem is that word 2010 kept crashing and corrupted some original .doc files.   Luckily I had backups and were able to restore them. Until I restored these files Word 2010 kept crashing.

I was thinking about how much we gave up as users by going to MS Word.  I remember the old DOS and cp/m days when I used Wordstar , WordPerfect and its ilk.  I just don’t remember this amount of crashes and this amount of work trying to fix it.  Is it really worth it that we sold out to MS Office and its clones?

The funny thing is that there is now “Write Mode” in some versions of word, which is pretty much what you had with wordperfect, wordstar etc.

I probably won’t switch to LibreOffice on my pc, which is what I use when Word 2010 crashes UNLESS these problems continue to plague me.