Replace problem in MS Word

[Noel]

A friend and I have found a problem when doing find-and-replace in MS Word. He writes: "I set up a couple of test documents and ran TextCrawler, but when it finishes a couple of things happen: even though my test documents only have one occurrence of the text I want to search and replace, it makes three changes per document; and worse, the resulting files are giving me an 'unable to open' error when I try to open them in Word. I�ve tried the text recovery and the open and repair functions, both to no avail. I�m using Word 2003 in Windows XP."

I'm having the same problem, except that I only see one replacement for each occurrence of the text. Once I've run a replace, I can't open the test Word documents either through TextCrawler, through Word, or from Windows Explorer.

I'm using Word 2000 in Vista, which I know isn't the best match, but I've not had any problems with the Word 2000 before now.

Any ideas on what our problem might be?

[DV]

TextCrawler only works on, and is designed for, plain text files (eg .txt, .ini, .html, etc). It won't work on binary formats such as MS Word/Office docs. Sorry!

[Noel]

Why is *.doc one of the preset designators on the dropdown Filename/Filter menu if Word isn't supported?

TextCrawler works wonderfully well for searches across multiple Word files. It's only when it changes the files that it seems to run into problems. Believe me, you'd have a winner among professional book editors, or anyone working with multiple Word files, if you'd tweak TextCrawler to replace text without damaging the Word files.

I'm going to continue to use it for searches.

[DV]

Thanks for your comments.
I might look into enabling it to read .doc at some point. As for .doc being in the drop down filter - it isn't there by default, you must have typed it in at some point and TextCrawler has remembered it.

[Noel]

Thanks for your replies.