The text “Figure” in Figure caption(???) made Word do something bad. Help me get out of this bad state!

Question

While writing a word document (office 2007) I added a figure. Then i right-clicked on it and selected "add caption". You then get a little box in which you can add some text. The box comes containing the test "Figure X" and you enter your text directly after the number X. I added the text "is an enlargment of Figure 2". Then Word did something which I can't recover from. Did it not like the word Figure in the caption and got confused? This is what it looks like:

All views except "Draft" look sort of like this. Selecting draft I see the document, but everything is marked. I can't unmark it and whatever I do it starts adding things to the clipboard. Emptying the clipboard doesn't help, closing word and starting it again doesn't help.

Please please can someone tell me how to get out of this mysterious mode!

Answer 1

As it's running in compatability mode, I'm assuming it's a .doc binary file, rather than the newer .docx xml based files...

Can you do a File | Save As, and save it as a .docx file format?

Once it's saved as a .docx, even if opening it still yields the same corrupt format as above, you should be able to open the docx container (as a zip file), and view the individual files inside. From there, you may be able to correct the issue - whatever that may be.

Answer 2

I would just revert to the previous backup copy and redo the changes.

If I have to work with MS Word, I usually save the document to new file with new name with "save as" function every 30-60 minutes or so. Because it's just matter of time when Word does something strange where recovery is hard or impossible.

Answer 3

User settings

It can be user settings. To check it, try using another user account. If the problem does not occur with it, try it:

• Go to application data folder (in Windows XP: c:\documents and settings\AnnaLR\Application data\Microsoft ; in Windows Vista/7: c:\user\AnnaLR\Appdata\Roaming\Microsoft)
• Rename Office and Word folders to Office.old and Word.old
• Run M$ Word again to check if the problem disappears.

An alternative way

If you want to finish that particular work: use another software. Try OpenOffice / LibreOffice.

Answer 4

I met with the same problem in Word 2010. Try this: Open the document, click Microsoft button->add-in->manage->template->go to->The global template and add-in->delete WordCmds.dot the name of those button may not be exactly right, because Word in my laptop is in Chinese. I hope that would help.