I’m a big time user of Microsoft Office. I’m constantly using Outlook, PowerPoint, Word and Excel. For the past couple of years, I’ve been using a PC laptop running Microsoft Vista.
If you’ve used Vista, you know that there always seems to be a problem (at least there has been for me). Once every couple of months, Word crashes on me. I can’t open documents by double-clicking on them and I can’t select text. It’s very frustrating. Each time this happens, I have to go and look for the solution online. I found out that it’s a problem with a corrupt file in my registry.
Even though I’m planning on upgrading to Windows 7 eventually, I thought I’d go ahead and post instructions on how to fix this problem:
- Exit all Office programs.
- Open the Registry Editor by clicking on your “Start” button and typing “regedit” (without the quotes) into the “Start Search” box.
- Locate the following registry subkey: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Word\Data
- Right click on “Data” and rename it to something like “olddata.”
- Exit Registry Editor.
- Start Word.
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