I have a problem with a Word 97 document (operating on Windows 95) which is 72 pages long, 1,549KB in size, is in two sections, and has a ‘Table of Contents’. This document contains a large number of tables which were originally cut from Excel files and pasted into the Word document. Out of the blue, this file has started to show the following warning message every time I open it: ‘This document may be corrupt. To preserve the contents choose ‘Select All’ from the ‘Edit’ menu, then choose ‘Copy’ from the ‘Edit’ menu. Create a new document, then choose ‘Paste’ from the ‘Edit’ menu’. When I follow this procedure the message persists when opening the newly created file. Even if I cut 2 pages from the document and create a new file the message persists. Despite this message, the file continues to operate in a normal manner. Can you advise me how to remove this message, please?

This error may be occurring not because of the Word document itself, but because of a problem with the tables you have cut and pasted from Excel. This would explain why you get the error message even when you cut just two pages from the original document into a new document. Another possibility is the sheer length and size of the file. In the past, I have experienced similar problems when pasting a large number of tables and graphs into a document which is both long in pages and large in size. Before commencing any of my suggestions, I strongly recommend that you backup your original document to a safe location in case something unexpected happens to the original copy of the document.

Then, the first thing to try is to copy (not cut) and paste two pages of the document, which you are getting the error message with, into a new document. If you get an error message after pasting this into the new document, you can ignore it for the moment. Save this new document, close it, and then reopen it again. If the message no longer appears, keep on copying small portions of the document across and repeating this procedure. By following this procedure you may be able to narrow down the problem to one specific page of the original document.

However, if the message does still appear on the new document, it looks like there is something really wrong with the document. One solution which I have used before, is saving the document with the*.txt extension. When I was doing a major school project this year, I was working on a document in WordPerfect. Out of the blue, the graphics within my document corrupted it and whenever I tried to open the document, WordPerfect would freeze. After trying everything, a friend suggested that I change the extension of the saved document to ‘.txt’. This both let me open the document and then save it again with no further problems! Before you do this, please make sure that you have a backup of the document as things can go wrong.

Now that you have completed that procedure, make a copy of the original document and place it somewhere easy to access (eg. the desktop). Then go into the ‘Windows Explorer’ and the ‘Tools’ (or ‘View’ menu) > ‘Folder Options’. In the window which appears, click the ‘View’ tab. Under the ‘Advanced Settings’ heading, there should be a tick in the box next to ‘Hide file extensions for known file types’. Click this so that the tick disappears. Click the ‘Ok’ button and minimise ‘Windows Explorer’ so you are back at the desktop. You should see the file on the desktop labelled something like ‘my word file.doc’. Rename the file so that it is now ‘my word file.txt’. When you do this, a message will appear saying that if you change the file extension the file may become unusable. Click ‘Yes’ to change the file extension. Now we will open it. DO NOT double-click the document to open it otherwise it will open in Notepad. Instead, go into Word and open the file through Word. If the message now no longer appears, then you can either try saving the file as a Word document or, if that doesn’t work, try copy and pasting the contents of the document into a new document.