How to Stop Embedding Linguistic Data in Your Word Documents

Some versions of Microsoft Word come with a very annoying “bug” that causes the following error message to show up almost every time you try to save a document.

“The document was saved, but data for speech recognition was lost because there was not enough space to store it. Be sure to turn off the microphone when not recording and check the available storage space on disk.”

This is because MS Word 2003 (and I think 2002) came with a setting called “Embed Linguistic Data” turned ON as a default. I am not sure why they chose to do that, but they did.

Actually, it is possible that this problem only affects computers with the Japanese version of Windows. Just in case that is indeed true, here is the error message that this post applies to.

文書は保存されましたが、音声認識データを保存する十分な空き領域がないため、データは失われました。録音していないときは、必ずマイクをオフにし、ディスクで利用できる記憶域を確認してください。

And the setting that needs to be changed in order to fix this problem:

言語データを埋め込む(U)
(Embed Linguistic Data)

There are two ways to stop this error message from showing up: a temporary solution and a permanent solution. (Both of these suggestions are based on the idea that you DON’T want to embed speech recognition data in your document.)

NOTE: My computer’s operating system is Japanese, so I might get the English names of some of the options wrong in the explanation below. Try to be creative and guess what I mean!

The Temporary Solution

1. Open the document you want to edit in Word.

2. Click on “Tools” in the menu bar.

3. Click on “Options” (which should be at the end of the list unless you have that ridiculous setting that takes out options that you don’t use in the menu).

4. Click on “Save”.

5. On the right hand side, near the top, there is an option called “Embed Linguistic Data”. Deselect that option (remove the checkmark by clicking on the box).

6. Click OK.

The error message will not show up for this document again, but it will probably happen the next time you open a new document.

The Permanent Solution

1. Close MS Word.

2. Make sure your computer is set to show all of your files and folders.

(You can change this setting back after you finish.)

Open “My Computer”. Click on “Tools”. Click on “Folder Options”. Click on “View”. You will see a list of options that you can change. Scroll down to about the middle of the list. You will see one that is called (something like) “View Files and Folders”. Underneath that, you are given two options: “Show all files and folders” and “Don’t show hidden files and folders”. Click on “Show all files and folders”.

3. Open MS Word in Safe Mode.

Click on the START button and find your link to MS Word. Hold down the Control key (Ctrl) and then click on the link to MS Word. This will open MS Word in Safe Mode. You will get a confirmation message asking if you want to open Word in Safe Mode. Click OK.

4. In Word, click on “File” in the menu bar.

5. Click “Open”.

6. Find “Normal.dot” and open it.

Normal.dot should be located in one of these places:

For Windows XP and 2000
Drive Letter (probably C:)\Documents and Settings\User Name\Application Data\Microsoft\Templates\

For Windows ME and 98
Drive Letter (probably C:)\Windows\Application Data\Microsoft\Templates\

(The parts in bold will be different for different computers.)

(This is why we had to make sure all of the folders and files were unhidden. If you skipped Step 2, and you can’t seem to locate Normal.dot you might want to go back and do it now.)

7. Once you find Normal.dot and open it and follow steps 2 to 6 in the “Temporary Solution” instructions above.

8. Save Normal.dot.

9. Close MS Word.

The next time you open MS Word, you should not receive this error message when you are working on new documents. You may still receive it when you are working with old documents that were made before you changed your Normal.dot template, or documents that were made on other people’s computers (unless they made the change too).

This information came from the Microsoft knowledge base (in Japanese). Click on that link if you want to see screenshots for completing this task on a computer with a Japanese operating system.