[German]Small addendum from October 8, 2024 – on this date, Microsoft fixed a bug in certain versions of Word that caused documents with a # in the file name or capital letters in the file name extension to be deleted on exit.
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What is this bug about?
The topic was addressed by me on October 2, 2024 – following a reader's comment – in the German blog post Löscht Microsoft Word RTF-Dateien (auch .DOCX) wegen Großschreibung? – an English version may be found here. Users noticed that since early October 2024, modified Word documents were deleted when the application was closed. The following conditions had to be met for this to happen:
- Word is closed via the close button without first saving a modified document. And the user confirms that the file should be saved.
- The file contains the # character in the file name or an uppercase letter in the file name extension.
If the conditions are met, the document file is moved to the recycle bin. The problem with this approach is that there is no recycle bin for certain shared folders and the document files are gone. Furthermore, some document management systems work with capital letters in the file name. There have been readers whose customers have lost a number of documents in this way.
After publishing the above post, other blog readers confirmed that the error can be reproduced in Microsoft Word 365 (Current Channel). I then posted a corresponding note in the German Microsoft Answers forum thread Kritischer Bug – Word löscht Dateien nach dem Speichern wenn diese ein # Zeichen im Dateinamen haben aus lokalen Laufwerken und Laufwerken im Netz.
MVP colleague Lisa Wilke-Thissen then took up the issue, obtained confirmations from colleagues and reported the problem to the Microsoft product group. A short time later, Microsoft developers were said to be investigating the problem. At the same time, some temporary solutions and workarounds were suggested, which I outlined in the blog post Microsoft investigates Word bug that deletes files when saving.
The bug has been fixed by Microsoft
As early as patch day, October 8, 2024, blog readers such as Adrian Weyler commented (thanks for that) with the feedback that the error had disappeared for him. The reader attributed it to the update for Office from October 8, 2024, but was surprised that Word still showed the build "16.0.18025.20030".
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Reader boef writes in this comment that the error was still present for him on October 8, 2024, despite installed updates. This contradicted the assumption that the fix had been rolled out via an Office update. On the other hand, the reader confirmed that the error suddenly disappeared on October 9, 2024.
I had therefore postponed the point of taking this up separately in the blog in order to do some research if necessary. In the meantime, Microsoft has updated the support article Locally saved Word files with capitalized file extensions or # in the title may be deleted after save on 8 October 2024.
It now states that the above problem has been fixed by a so-called "service change", which Microsoft rolled out in full on October 8, 2024. Microsoft writes: If the problem continues to occur, all open Office applications should be closed. According to Microsoft, if Word is then restarted, it is ensured that the change has been applied.
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Microsoft Word deletes files due to file extension capitalization
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