New MBP, and am having memory trouble errors with MS Word 2004

Question

Hi,
I know this has been talked about before, but I'm not sure where to post this question. I have a new MBP, with a full version of Word (no previous trial software installed). I have been trying to copy and past basic text files from Yahoo mail, to create a book of emails of sorts. My file size has been approaching my memory capacity (basic setup). Does it not create a swap file and let you keep going if you approach the limits of the onboard memory? I understand it will run a bit slower, but I'm only moving text files and nothing else. Why the proverbial memory/disk full error messages? Does it have anything to do with the software being non universal code?
Do I need to get rid of temporary files, as Im copying and pasting alot? If so, how?
Anyone have the same trouble, and have a clear solution? I could also swear my MPB is running alot slower with Word than I would have expected.
Any help you can give me would b appreciated.
Thanks,
Dave

Answer 1

I’ll try to answer your questions briefly without going into too much detail. First of all, I think the error message you are seeing is generated by MS Word and not your operating system. That particular error, and other similar ones, are quite common in Word in particular situations and are the result of a known bug.
As far as I know, there is no fix, but there are several work-arounds. The bug has to do with the number of temporary files that get created when working with large Word files. As you might guess, the larger your file, the larger the temp files, and they will quickly fill up your existing RAM, which then causes the error that generates the message. You have to delete the temp files---you can do that by saving and closing your file, then restart it. There are some scripts you can run, but that is beyond what I want to get into here (and usually is not necessary).
The other problem is that by copying and pasting text from Yahoo Mail, you are not pasting simple text---you are pasting all the HTML code, formatting, and everything else that is contained in that text. And Word saves it all, then adds its own formatting and other code---leading to corrupt files sooner or later.
And then, to make it all worse, if your file is as large as you say it is (close to system memory in size), that is one huge Word file, and Word does not handle really large files very well, especially Word 2004, but all versions of Word, Windows versions included, have trouble with large files.
Word does in fact run slowly on even the newest MacBook Pros because Word is not yet compiled for the Intel Macs and does not run natively as a universal binary but runs under Rosetta, which translates Word to run on Apple computers running Intel CPUs. If you are working with small files, it isn’t too bad, but big files will slow it down to almost a crawl at times, or it will even stop responding for several seconds between each command.
You can work around these problems by breaking your file into much smaller ones, save often (and close the file once in while), and save as a text file, rather than as a doc file.
An alternative is to use another word processor or text editor to save your copied text---there are many that will work as well as or better than Word for what you want to do. Pages is a good alternative----I have to collaborate on Word files every day, and I prefer to work on my MacBook Pro (although I also use Windows-based computers about as frequently, too), and except for the most complex Word files with tables, charts, and pictures, Pages works very well, and you can save the file as a Word document, too, if you need to.
Hope that answers some of your questions----and always remember….I could be wrong.