Word: You Are Working Without a Word Work File and Memory is Nearly Full

I have been struggling with a Microsoft Word problem for a few weeks now. Whenever I opened a document and then began changing it, I occasionally received an error message. Once the error message appeared,all the buttons and options within Word became grayed out. This prevented me from saving my work that I had done up to that point. It became frustrating to say the least.

To find a solution to the problem I turned to the Internet. It appears that this error is quite popular as a search in Google produced many results. I tried many of the solutions, but none seemed to have worked for me. It wasn’t until I decided to look further into the error that I found the solution that appears to have fixed the problem.

Word 2003 Error

While working on a Word document I encountered the following error:

The error prevents me from saving my work, contradicting the error message, which means that I lost anything that I changed in the document since the last save. The error is also confusing as I have 2GB of memory in the computer that was running word, and there was plenty of memory available.

When I did a search online, there were many results for that particular error message. Some indicate that the problem was from Word 2000, while others from newer versions. I tried various solutions, but none seemed to work. I decided to look further.

The Solution

While reading some of the solutions I noticed that some had made reference to the Word cache size, which is defaulted to 64. While I couldn’t find where to set this in Word, I decided to see if it can be changed in the Windows registry. Usually settings such as this are located in the registry. I managed to find a site that listed the key to change.

The following steps outline the process to modify the Word cache size:

1. Close any open Word windows.
2. Open the Windows registry by running “regedit.exe” from a command prompt.
3. Once the registry editor is opened, navigate to “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Word\Options”.

   This key is for Word 2003, indicated by the 11.0 version. You will need to navigate to the key indicating your Word version.

4. Click the “Options” key on the left to display all the values within that key. In an empty location on the right, right-click and select “New->DWORD value”.
5. Type “CACHESIZE” as the value name and press “Enter”.
6. Double-click the value “CACHESIZE” to open the “Edit DWORD Value” dialog box.
7. Under “Base”, select “Decimal”. Under “Value Data”, type “512″ (without the quotes).
8. Click the “OK” button to accept your changes and close the dialog.
9. Close the registry editor.

When I relaunched Word, I never received the error message displayed above. This registry change seemed to have fixed the error. From what I read, you can set the CACHESIZE value to any value that is a multiple of 64 up to a maximum of 1024. While I can’t guarantee that it will solve the problem if you experienced the error, it may just be the fix you need.