"Blocked for Editing"

[Walter E.]

Word 2013 is giving me conniptions. Wish I could go back to Word 2003

From time to time, if I type a document and save it in the normal fashion to
my "Documents" folder, and if I then try to reopen the same document, Word
tells me that the Document is locked for editing. It means just that: I can
no longer make changes to the document and save them.

That means I am stuck and have to re-type the document, save it again with a
new name and, with luck, it will not be locked. If I insist on opening the
document, it looks weird and with two columns. This locking feature asserts
itself at random.

I spent a lot of time looking in the >File > Options sections looking for
any entry that might cause this behavior but all options settings look OK

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Maybe I should go back to my 2002
Word, no locking there!

Walter

 

[Peter T. Daniels]

Sometimes that happens in Word2007, too. I just Save As an .rtf, and the
next time I open it, it saves quite happily as a .docx. It does mess up
the bibliography fields to some extent, but most people probably don't
use the bibliography device.

 

[Stefan Blom]

If Word has crashed, there may be left-over temporary files (so-called
"lock" files, to be more precise) causing these kind of problems. Take a
look at http://www.gmayor.com/what_to_do_when_word_crashes.htm.