As part of my job, I edit large Word documents, usually created by Windows users. These documents include pictures, comments, tracked changes, and so on. Word 2008 seems to hate them -- it crashes more than a drunken toddler driving a Ferrari. Over time, however, I've developed a number of techniques to mitigate the disasters.
If Word crashes and then restarts, don't accept its recovered document. Close it and then open the last version you saved. Also I only ever use Save As now, not File » Save, or Command-S. I think it's this form of saving that's causing the problems. Maybe the disastrous bug is part of a 'quick save' routine?
Finally, if there's a document that Word crashes with, and continues to crash with, I had some luck opening it on a Windows version of Word using VMWare Fusion, and then saving it out again. This seems to iron out the bugs, but it didn't always work (and in fact, worked fewer times than it actually worked in the first place).
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