debugging documents

[norrahe]

this question came up in an interview recently

How would you debug a word doc without debugging tools? Apart from using word for everyday docs I'm not too familiar with this.

[cojak]

What is there to debug, unless you're using macros?

If there was a file corruption, I'd probably cut and paste into notepad and then reset style in a new doc.

Or select all and clear styles completely and reformat.

Or maybe there's some secret squirel code that we mortals don't know about...

[norrahe]

ta!

mr Nor got asked that in a phone interview and was a bit flummoxed as the natural answer would be use de-bugging tools.

It may have been throw any type of question at said interviewee.

[NickFitz]

I could pretend to know a lot about it, or I could point you at Troubleshooting Word 2007 Documents More Easily Using VBA in the MSDN Library

Although my first answer would probably be "I'd call IT and ask them why the hell they'd removed the Script Debugger from the Office installation."

Bonus MSDN Library hint: if you click on the "low bandwidth view" link at the top right of an article, the library suddenly becomes fast enough to be usable

[norrahe]

apparently they said it was a 10k page doc, what cojak said is the only other options he could think of.

Still not the end of the world, he's got another interview with them anyway.

[cojak]

I'm not a dev techie - I don't use Word for anything complicated, the most I'd c0ck up would be styles and tables...

[Addanc]

Could try opening it with Open Office, Star Office (ancestor) always used to be better at recovering info from Word documents than MS Word.

[Sysman]

Could try opening it with Open Office, Star Office (ancestor) always used to be better at recovering info from Word documents than MS Word.

I've used Open Office and even hexdump to get at stuff that won't display.

[cojak]

Could try opening it with Open Office, Star Office (ancestor) always used to be better at recovering info from Word documents than MS Word.

Oh yeah, I've done that before now - I forgot about OO.