Mac Word 2008 Repaginating?

[RemiJ]

I'm 125 pages into my book and now the Word program that it's being written on opens with the message that the document is repaginating. What does this mean? Should I be worried that I'm going to lose it?

I've only ever used Word before for simple tasks. I tried looking up instructions on what this meant and how to fix it, but I'm too unfamiliar with the program to follow the directions. I don't seem to have the options they list anyway.

Help, Help, Help. Should I open a new document and continue my story in that? I've been saving copies in my email account. Will those be corrupted too? Am I corrupted already?

[Nekko]

I have to admit that I've mostly switched to writing in Pages. But twice I've run into problems with it too. When I've copied and pasted into a new document it seemed to leave the glitches behind. It certainly can't hurt.

Good luck!

[Ctairo]

Do you get an actual error every time you open the file? Documents tend to repaginate as you add/subtract text (or add headers/footers). Unless something strange is happening (i.e., the text disappears), I don't think there's an issue.

Make sure you back the work up though to be safe.

[aibrean]

I would make a new document and copy your content into there and save and see if that gets rid of the issue. I've never had that come up on mine, but if it did I would probably be freaking out!

[Medievalist]

Originally Posted by RemiJ

I'm 125 pages into my book and now the Word program that it's being written on opens with the message that the document is repaginating. What does this mean? Should I be worried that I'm going to lose it?

It's fairly normal on a very large file to see that on opening the file.

It means it's going through the file and rending the text as pages, is all.

What I would do is got to Preferences in Word, and look under the section on Saving and make sure you've got Fast Save turned off. It tends to corrupt files.

I'd also regularly do a Save As and save the file as both a Word file and as an RTF or Rich Text File, using the name and the current date.

For instance:

my_novel_11_16_2012.rtf
my_novel_11_16_2012.doc

Those are your belt-and-suspender backups. I'd think about putting copies in DropBox or Sugar Sync.

[RemiJ]

Thank you everybody! I've done everything you suggested. Super scary because it started around 50,000+ words. What bigger nightmare could there be than losing your work?