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A bug in Google Docs causes it to crash when typing a series of words in a document opened with the online word processor.
Once locked, you may not be able to easily access the document again, as doing so would cause the lock to occur again.
BleepingComputer was able to reproduce the issue last night and contacted Google.
Google told us that it is aware of the bug and is working to fix it. Until then, we share a solution below.
YYY And it’s gone!
It’s official—Google Docs fails to see “YYYY Y”. when the option “Show grammar suggestion” is activated.
A Google Docs user, Pat Needham, raised the issue on the Google Docs Publishers Help Forum.
“I’ve only tested it in Google Chrome, with documents from three separate Google accounts (personal, G Suite Basic, and a work account that could be enterprise). All three experience the same issue,” the user wrote.
“It’s case sensitive. So trying ‘y.YYYY’ doesn’t cause it to crash.”
While Needham publicly reported the bug, it appears the issue was discovered by Eliza Callahan, who was writing a novel of poems for her novel using Google Docs.
In tests conducted last night by BleepingComputer, the behavior was successfully reproduced on the latest version of the Chrome web browser running on macOS Monterey.
After creating a new Google Docs document, as soon as we typed the offending string into the document and refreshed the page, we started getting the following error messages and were unable to review or edit the document any further:
Needham’s findings have also been confirmed by other users running Firefox 99.0.1.
Another user, Sergii Dymchenko, said strings like “But. But. But. But. But.” elicited the same response. Some also noted that putting any of the terms like “Also, Therefore, And, Anyway, But, Who, Why, Also, However” in the same format achieved the result.
A YCombinator HackerNews reader suspected the cause was the “Show Grammar Hint” option in Google Docs, which was turned on by default in our test.
A Google spokesperson confirmed the presence of the issue to BleepingComputer, adding: “We are aware of this issue and the team is working to fix it.”
How to retrieve your document?
Until Google has an answer as to what is causing this issue, you may want to turn off grammar suggestions by navigating to Tools → Spelling and Grammar and unchecking ‘Show grammar suggestions’.
If the error has already been triggered and you are unable to access the Google document in question, there may be a solution.
Use the Google Docs mobile app to access the document, remove the offending words, and the file should now open correctly in your web version of Google Docs as well.
“For some reason, it doesn’t lock docs on mobile, so if you’ve lost one of your docs because of this, you can get the Docs app on your phone, delete the offending sentence, and reload,” user Sauron Gorthaur suggests. .
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