Big help! Can't save document - spinning wheel.

[Morven11]

A spinning wheel is encircling a word document - actually a job application I've spent the last couple of hours doing. I hate the thought of losing it, as the deadline is tomorrow morning.

Have a Mac but have MS installed and doing this in word.

Have googled for help to no avail. Still spinning away. Any suggestions?
Many thanks!

Were you about to 'save' it?

If you can still get at it, it might just be possible to Ctrl A to select text, and save as 'plain text'.

Modern programs sometimes 'self protect' so even if you have to reboot, it may just about manage to survive.

Not much help to you now, but you should always re-save every few minutes, so you have got a copy to get back to if the worst does happen.

Hope you can recover it.

I've always ended up having to force quit (and have lost whatever I've done since the last autosave).
I now autosave every 5 mins max (sometimes less, depends what I'm doing).
Word not massively stable on Macs I find

Hopefully you've already solved the problem. But, just in case:

Try hitting the Esc key - that might stop Word doing what it's trying to do but failing.

Use Save As, to save the document under a different name to a folder on your hard drive.

I'm only guessing about what the problem is - but when you open a Word document, it creates a temporary copy in the same location. If that's on, say, a USB drive which you then remove while you're working on the document, Word can't then access that temporary copy, and throws a hissy fit.