macros enable the automation of some regular tasks.outline numbering is used for all headings, including appendices.

document automation (fields and bookmarks) populates the headers and footers and some of the front matter.they can have hundreds of comments from reviewers.each document can have multiple authors or reviewers who add their track changes and comments.track changes are turned on from one revision to the next.they can have many tables, some of which can be quite complex with merged cells, sideways text etc.they can have up to 100 section breaks for portrait/landscape and A3 page orientations and sizes, and they have odd/even pages for each section.But before we could point the finger at SharePoint as being the issue causing the crashes, I suggested that we take a staged approach to identifying what was causing Word to crash. The main difference between how they worked and how I worked was that all those experiencing crashes were working directly on the documents within SharePoint, whereas I work via VPN and check out the document from SharePoint and get SharePoint to save it locally to my default SharePoint directory until such time as I’m ready to check it back in (effectively, SharePoint downloads the document to my local machine, and uploads it again when I’m finished with it - I don’t work on the document over the network, as my colleagues do). These were the same documents I’d worked on just days and sometimes hours before with no problem at all. So it was surprising that I heard of several work colleagues experiencing regular crashes in Word 2007.

And if it did, there was an option to let Word try to recover as much of the document as possible. I’ve worked in Word 2003, Word 2007, and Word 2010, and I can’t recall the last time Word crashed on me. Since Word 2003, I’ve rarely had Word crash on me - and in the past few years I’ve worked on some pretty long and complex documents with lots of section breaks, complex tables, large figures, and track changes turned on.

The days of complex Word documents crashing regularly are a thing of the past, in my experience. Microsoft has definitely improved the stability of software like Word over the years.

Microsoft word crashes when saving