{"id":782,"date":"2010-10-06T07:49:42","date_gmt":"2010-10-06T07:49:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/alexeames.com\/blog\/?p=782"},"modified":"2010-10-06T07:49:42","modified_gmt":"2010-10-06T07:49:42","slug":"indexing-caused-file-corruption-word-2007","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/alexeames.com\/blog\/2010\/10\/indexing-caused-file-corruption-word-2007\/","title":{"rendered":"Indexing Caused File Corruption in Word 2007"},"content":{"rendered":"

I had a fairly scary experience yesterday when I was making a new index for the latest version of my ebook Business Success for Freelance Translators (the new title for How To Earn $80,000+ per year as a Freelance Translator.) Basically what happened was, after updating the index with the new concordance file, some of the links in the book were mangled.<\/p>\n

And after generating a PDF of the text, the original Word file could no longer be opened. \ud83d\ude25 <\/p>\n

“Eek.” \ud83d\ude2e I hear you say. All that work lost? Well not quite. Only about an hour’s work lost actually. I’ve been using computers for over 30 years and I don’t really trust them an inch. So when I’m working on something really important I usually save a new version of the file every time I make substantial changes (say more than an hour or two of work). Consequently, I had a version of the file that had been spell-checked, but not paginated or indexed. So all I had to do was repaginate, save the file as a new version and then do the indexing again.<\/p>\n

Once indexed, and saved, the file wouldn’t open. :teeth: No problem. Back to the spell-checked and paginated version. I found a macro to strip out all the previous index entry codes<\/a>, applied this, made a new index from scratch, saved the file, made a PDF version et voila. PDF version is fine, but the indexed file still will not open in Word 2007.<\/p>\n

I’ve got no idea why this is, and it’s not the end of the world, but it is a bit of a nuisance. Perhaps it’s something to do with it being a legacy file that’s been updated and updated since the orginial version in 1998 through various different versions of Word (including Mac versions from my US editor).<\/p>\n

It doesn’t really matter. No significant amount of work has been lost, and I got to my destination (a publishable PDF). But it was a bit scary for a while, until I thankfully realised I had oodles of older versions to go back to.<\/p>\n

Computers are great, but don’t trust them an inch when it comes to valuable work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How indexing a legacy file caused file corruption and made me very glad I am somewhat protective with multiple backup files.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4,7,8],"tags":[30,47,61,110],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/alexeames.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/782"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/alexeames.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/alexeames.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alexeames.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alexeames.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=782"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/alexeames.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/782\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/alexeames.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=782"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alexeames.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=782"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alexeames.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=782"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}