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Word 2013 cannot open large file saved by Word 2010

Anonymous
2013-03-13T13:04:14+00:00

I have a large thesis (~500 pages) that can be opened and saved fine within Word 2010. However, I cannot open it with Word 2013. I get the following error:

We're sorry. We can't open thesis.docx because we found a problem with its contents.

Details:

Operation aborted: max-element-depth constraint violated.

Location: Part: /word/webSettings.xml, Line: 2, Column: 53870

A subsequent dialog box does allow me to recover the file. However, a further Show Repairs dialog has a single "Summary Info 1" item that does not provide extra information. Moreover, even after saving again, errors are continuously being found in the document every time it is opened. There is no permanent way to resolve these errors.

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Anonymous
2013-03-14T14:48:57+00:00

Yes. After recovery, I do save it with a new file name. When I try to open the new file, it gives the same error.

By renaming thesis.docx to thesis.docx.zip I could extract the webSettings.xml file. Its contents do look highly suspicious (although balanced) in terms of how deeply the nesting structure is. I don't know how to attach any files here (copying the contents removes all whitespace), so I have sent you this file via email.

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  1. Anonymous
    2013-03-31T00:54:10+00:00

    I had exactly the same problem here with a thesis of 85 pages. :-)

    For me it was column 49xxx, but the rest was the same.

    It took me all the evening to figure this out, but I have a working solution now and wanted to share this with you.

    Thanks to your information on renaming the file to xxx.docx.zip (didn't knew, the docx-format is a container), I could simply delete the webSettings.xml out of the container. And voilà: no more problems when opening the document. Obviously, there is no need for this file. :-)

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  2. Anonymous
    2013-05-29T11:13:14+00:00

    I think "thesis" is the common denominator here... The same think happened to me. So I rename blah.docx to blah.docx.zip, unzip it, navigate to the word folder inside and delete the webSettings file, recompress that unzipped folder back to a .zip file, rename back to the original name blah.docx, and everything works?  Any ideas what causes this? I'm afraid it will keep happening as I continue editing the *thesis*

    btw, my docx file was only 40 pages when this started happening.

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  3. Anonymous
    2013-04-02T16:49:30+00:00

    I tried deleting the webSettings.xml file and that worked for me too. Next time I saved the document, a new webSettings.xml file was created. Nevertheless, I am leery of such changes without knowing what was the purpose for that file. Perhaps future corruptions will ensue?

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  4. Doug Robbins - MVP - Office Apps and Services 323.1K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2013-03-13T23:43:49+00:00

    Have you tried saving it with a new name?

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