While typing a doc in Word, the spinning wheel appeared and froze the Word document. I had another Word doc open at the time. I tried to force quit, but it didn't work. I would like to save it before losing my work, but the spinning wheel blocks me.

Question

While creating a Word doc, the spinning wheel appeared and won't go away.  Another Word doc was open at same time.  How do I get this fixed while saving my work?

Answer 1

rollrock wrote:
How do I get this fixed while saving my work?
Basically, you don't.
The 'spinning wheel' is simply an indicator that an operation is taking longer than it should. It doesn't say anything about why, or even if it's an error or not. If it's in Word, it could be that the app is hung, or it could be that it is waiting for some kind of user input, or input from another app. (My bet would be on the former.) You could go into Activity Monitor, identify the process that's making it wait, kill it, cross your fingers and hope that it would generate an error that would cause Word to return control to the user (you). If you had the expertise, that is, and the moon were in right quadrant.
Realistically, your only option is to force-quit Word. Once that is done, if AutoRecovery was on, then, with luck, you could recover much of your work. Here
<http://kb.iu.edu/data/ahnd.html>
you'll find a quick overview of AutoRecovery and how it works.
If it wasn't on (it should be on by default), then you're out of luck. Chalk it up to experience, turn it on, and back to the grindstone.