I am using Word 97 and being a researcher, I keep documents to use as bibliographies of books, articles and law cases. The simplest method that I have found to do this is to just paste the new entries as a block at the end of the bibliography file. Over the years the files has grown pretty big (300-600k each) and Word is behaving strangely. Things that have been occurring are the breaks in the paragraphs have disappeared (even though the text looks the same) so it is treating the whole document as one big paragraph. I can re-insert the breaks manually but this is laborious (ie. I can’t simply do it by using SEARCH/REPLACE). I know this isn’t a problem with the file being corrupt because it is happening to all my documents of that size. Any tips on how I could remedy, and/or prevent this annoying problem?

The cause of this problem may be that you do not have sufficient RAM available to store this document in when you are editing it. This could be causing Word to behave strangely. When you are editing the document close any non-vital applications that are running at the time to free up RAM. If this does not work then you may have to span the document across two or more files.