Why so many Word document rescue tools

My wife is neqaring the end of a degree, which has a number of textual documents associated with it. I never recalled having corrupted word documents in the past - however word documents appeared to be getting corrupte for no reason on my wife's laptop.

I though it was hardware dependant - until she saved her 2000 word assignment on our main computer. Shut the computer sown. Re-booted it about an hour later - and the document was corrupted.

What astounded me was the myriad of products to rescue/recover word documents. One product - which to its credit worked very well, cost $149. Youch.

So, why after years of using PCs have I only become aware of Word corrupting docs recently.... and why isn't the recovery software within word capable of recovering corrupted documents?

I've noticed something similar with MS Office documents. Some colleagues had a 4MB Excel sheet, and it didn't have much data in it. I resaved it with OpenOffice in XLS format, and it went down to 320KB. And they could still open it with Excel and it worked fine. Also when they resaved it with Excel it stayed small. So my guess is that Excel and Word and other MS Office products are saving some useless information into the documents, or they just save corrupted data into them. Even if it was all "Undo" data, it should be saved into a seperate file, or it should ask if the user wants to save 4MB of crap along the file.

There's a HUGE amount of information saved with the file, relating to things such as author, revision numbers, word counts and template info

even still if there is stats as Malice suggests saved with the docs - strectching a 320KByte Spreadsheet to 4MBytes.... That is going some

There is a quick save option that saves the file quicker but at a larger file size, you can disable this in the options somewhere.

...And "Auto space like Word 95." Check out the OOXML ISO standardization stuff (OOXML is the docx format) to find out just how horrible it is.

Took them ages of lobying / shady business to get the thing accepted, and in the end not even their own software supports the format natively. Meanwhile, ODF (also an ISO standard, accepted properly well before their mess) does everything the docx format does, better, with far easier to understand specifications and existing implementations.
So, err, yes: Microsoft Office's file format is awful. It reminds me of their versions of HTML and CSS.

The main reason for this, is that prior to Office 2007, an office document is literally a memory dump of the RAM used by the office application in question.
That also means that if you copy/paste stuff around or insert / delete images, some of that memory may not be released and still get written to your word file. (which means that if you look at your word documents in a hexeditor you may see a lot of stuff that is no longer visible in the document itself. Even worse, you may see bits and pieces of entirely unrelated files from your harddrive if they happened to be loaded into part of your computers RAM earlier.

This entire "lets save dump the memory and call it a fileformat" is also the main reason why it's been difficult for 3rd parties to create file load and save routines that are 100% compatible with Word and Excel -- there basically IS no fileformat.

Probably because Microsoft has released a bazillion critical updates to Office over the years.

If you have installed any office updates over the years, then you reeally aren't using the same product anymore as you did a few years back. It's quite likely that one or more of these security fixes had some unfortunate sideeffects.

The entire Office codebase has gotten incredibly messy over the past decade and a half, and the internal documentation is next to non-existent if the ISO standardization paperwork was any indication.
Critical vulnerabilities require fixes, and fixes always have a chance of introducing errors -- more so when the code is a mess to begin with.

One word: "horribleclosedspecificationmicrosoftstuff". and what xlsior said.
Open document format should be the only way forward for all office software.
I think MS have realised this and i read somewhere that office will now use an open format as its default.

Yeah, similar to how MS have dealt with their OS's...

rather than clear up the framework, things are just bolted on, leaving lots of redundant junk lying around.

some interesting points, especially the dump of RAM assocoated with a file. The documents my wife has experienced problems with word docs with.... images pasted in!

I wonder if openoffice is as susceptible to corruption - I suspect not.

Thats crazy about the memory dump thing! Were the programmers too lazy to write a file format or something???????? jeez.

It's crazy, and also wrong. ;)

Microsoft Office 97-2007 File Format Specifications

Open Office ain't perfect either - I've had documents become corrupted when using unusual fonts on the odd occasion.

My open office spreadsheets like to lose their graph forumals when I re-open. But thats more down to the program then the file format...

Ive not had any problems using OO (yet) although i rarely use it on windows (oo uses runtime environments on windows, could have something to do with it :/ Its certainly the reason its so much slower on win)

Spolsky has a nice article on the whys and wherefores.

I know what is it.

its the flight simulator saved it makes it 4mb :)

Since Word has been around for a very long time, and, it's merely been added to and bloated over the years, I'm guessing this is to do with a lack of foresight and a reluctance to start over.

You say that like it's a bad thing :D