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I am experiencing an annoying problem, and am looking for clues and suggestions. I'm using Word 97 on Windows NT. Sometimes when I try to open a document, I get an error message:
"Word cannot open this document template (C:\PROGRAM FILES\...\PDFWRITER97.DOC)".
I click on OK, then I get this message:
"Word cannot open the existing "|_| "
(The last part of the above is a crude email rendition of the box character.) What the heck does that mean?
So I click on OK again. If I'm in just plain Word, it opens the document at that point. If I'm running Word through RoboHelp, I then also get a RoboHelp error message:
"RoboHelp was unable to start MS Word to complete the requested action."
I searched the Microsoft help database on "template", to no avail. I tried to sign myself up on the Word-PC list, but have been unsuccessful so far. My 1244-page Word reference book hasn't been much help on this particular subject (although it makes a dandy paperweight).
In addition to these examples I've gotten on my own workstation just today, I've also run into it in another situation. I've recently put together an internal web site, which will be accessed by people in this office, in an office in another state, and by field reps. Rather than convert all docs to HTML, I decided to link directly to read-only Word documents. The document then opens up in a separate window in Word, and I can safely assume that everybody who needs to see these documents has Word on their machine. Except the users are now getting this same series of error messages described above when they try to link out to the Word documents from the web page. ARRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHH!
I don't remember getting these template error messages in Word 95, although maybe I'm just looking at the past with rose-colored glasses. If you want someone look at a Word document, do you have to send along all the templates you used when building it? That doesn't seem reasonable.
