How to debug a problematic word document

Question

I realize that there are tons of questions with similar symptoms, but I checked most of them and could not find an answer.

My system setup is as follows; nothing special running in the background:

Windows 8.1 64-bit.
Office 2013, no add-ons, no macros.
Intel i7
8GB of RAM
SSD

What happens is that from time to time something happens to MS Word (while I am editing a document) and it becomes unresponsive eating up 100% CPU, scrolling is jumpy, etc… This is probably related to certain documents; I’ve noticed that it happens with certain documents more often then others. I know what the problematic documents are, but I cannot not work with them. Copy and pasting the content into a new document does not help and the documents in question are not particularly large.

So how to debug this issue? Where do I start?

How can I inspect the document to see what kind of stuff (in addition to plain text) they put in there? I tried the “inspect document” thing and it found some stuff, but it is not very informative - it just says “custom XML found,” “invisible objects found,” etc… I tried removing what can be removed, but this did not help. I would like to actually see what has it found.

How can I debug Word when the problem occurs?

Any other ideas?

score 3 · Answer 1 · edited Mar 20 '17 at 10:17

You could use Process Explorer to debug Word when the problem happens :

Right-click on winword.exe, choose Properties, and go to the Threads tab. Identify the thread that is using the CPU and click on it, then press the Stack button to see which system calls it is using.

A detailed description of this procedure can be found in this answer.

If you wish us to take a look at it, take a screenshot and post it here.

score 2 · Answer 2 · edited Feb 27 '16 at 15:44

Did you try saving the doc as an RTF, and then opening it again in Word?

You said you tried Copy and Paste but did you try the special Copy and Paste trick for Word ? (This used to work, years ago.)

First activate Display All Format Characters (Ctrl + Shift +8 ).
Select all the doc except the final paragraph mark.
Copy the selection to the Clipboard (Ctrl + C).
Press Ctrl + N to open a new doc.
Paste the Clipboard content into the new doc (Ctrl + V).

Is there any improvement?

The final paragraph mark "contains" the document attributes including all the eventual bugs.

If all that doesn't work, open the doc with LibreOffice and then just save it as a new doc as an LibreOffice doc. Then open the new doc with Word. It may have changed slightly, but often this does the trick. If that doesn't work try saving the LibreOffice file as a Word doc.

If your original buggy Word doc is not too complicated, you may be able to open it with Wordpad, then save it as a doc, and reopen it with Word.

Final idea, you say you have 8 GB of RAM. Maybe you added on some cheap buggy RAM to a 4 GB system? I did that once and encountered several problems. All OK since I removed the extra RAM.

score 0 · Answer 3 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:41

The exact cause of the issue can't be determined from the information that you've provided, but these are some possible causes that I can imagine:

Microsoft Office 2013 is corrupt
An add-in is malfunctioning
Malware has affected Word's ability to edit a document
Something is broken in the document, causing Word to lock up

Troubleshooting Tips

Reinstall Microsoft Office 2013

I had to do this myself not too long ago when I messed up file associations and deleted some system files that I shouldn't have deleted.

If you can't remove Office 2013 through Add or Remove Programs, you can use this Fix It to remove it.

Disabling Problematic Add-Ins

Add-ins are extensions to Microsoft Office products, and if you have a buggy one installed, it could cause Word to freeze as you described.

You can manage add-ins by following Microsoft's support portal article on them here.

Check for Malware

Malware can affect Word's functionality. Malware removal is discussed in this Super User question.

Editing in a Different Word Processor

Google Docs and LibreOffice are alternatives to Microsoft Office. If you use one of the two alternatives to edit your Word document and save again as a Word document, the alternative software might remove the part(s) of the document that were causing Word to freeze.

Manual Inspection

I'm out of other ideas, but if you are up to digging into the internal parts of a Word document, they can be opened with an archive viewer and plain text editor (I suggest Notepad++ for syntax highlighting). Since you mentioned that you were using Microsoft Office 2013, I hope your documents are in the DOCX file format.

DOCX (Office Open XML Document) files are actually just ZIP files:

nick@workstation [~/Downloads]# file example.docx
example.docx: Zip archive data, at least v2.0 to extract

Here's the structure of the ZIP file:

nick@workstation [~/Downloads]# unzip -t example.docx
Archive:  example.docx
    testing: _rels/.rels              OK
    testing: docProps/core.xml        OK
    testing: docProps/app.xml         OK
    testing: word/document.xml        OK
    testing: word/styles.xml          OK
    testing: word/fontTable.xml       OK
    testing: word/numbering.xml       OK
    testing: word/theme/theme1.xml    OK
    testing: word/theme/_rels/theme1.xml.rels   OK
    testing: word/header1.xml         OK
    testing: word/footer1.xml         OK
    testing: word/media/image1.png    OK
    testing: word/settings.xml        OK
    testing: word/_rels/document.xml.rels   OK
    testing: [Content_Types].xml      OK
No errors detected in compressed data of example.docx.

To open a DOCX file as a ZIP file, all you need to do is change the file extension from ".docx" to ".zip".

After extracting the DOCX/ZIP, the actual document contents are located at ./word/document.xml. The data may be saved as a single line; the reason for this is to reduce file size. You can use various "XML tidy" tools to make the XML code more readable.

I don't know enough about your problematic documents to point you to what you should be looking for, but you can pick out any pieces of the document by tedious trial-and-error (erasing a block of XML, recompressing the decompressed document, changing the file extension back from ZIP to DOCX) to see what may be causing Word to freeze.

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Apr 07 '15 at 07:36

another option is to download and run Microsoft OffCAT (Office Configuration Analyzer Tool). It detects configuration problems with office installations (and specific Office programs, Word included). I've only used it with Outlook, and it has been very helpful.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2013/03/20/released-office-configuration-analyzer-offcat-tool.aspx

score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Apr 08 '15 at 19:17

Try opening the same document(s) from online msword https://office.live.com/start/word.aspx. If it works problem is with your copy of msoffice so reinstall it. If online word can' open it then try with some other online editing websites, if no website can open it there is nothing we can do