Mac Forum / Applications / Word / July 2006

Hi Kathleen:

The versions are permanently lost.

You are correct, the pointer in the document is indeed pointing to the wrong
version.

The way to prevent this happening is to NEVER USE VERSIONS :-)

"Versions" was a fearsomely unstable mechanism introduced many years ago by
someone who wanted to prove how clever they were with the new Word document
format (this was Word 97 we're talking about).

It has been causing trouble and misery ever since.  Essentially, the Word
.doc format is just not reliable enough to do the job.  And as you have
discovered, when you get a document corruption, you lose ALL the versions
because you have all your eggs in one basket.

In fact, you have been lucky: you usually lose the entire document!

So now you know: keep your versions as separate, appropriately named files

The new XML format coming with Word 2007 and later will be much more stable.
But it will still be a seriously high risk from a data protection point of
view to keep all your previous versions in a single file :-)

cheers

On 31/7/06 6:55 AM, in article
1154292915.767402.288650@h48g2000cwc.googlegroups.com,