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:
You are working without a Word work file and memory is nearly full. Save your work
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:
- Close any open Word windows.
- Open the Windows registry by running “regedit.exe” from a command prompt.
- 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.
- 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”.
- Type “CACHESIZE” as the value name and press “Enter”.
- Double-click the value “CACHESIZE” to open the “Edit DWORD Value” dialog box.
- Under “Base”, select “Decimal”. Under “Value Data”, type “512” (without the quotes).
- Click the “OK” button to accept your changes and close the dialog.
- 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.