Tom
2004-10-10 14:23:43 UTC
I have just experienced a worrisome Word error, and would
love some guidance. (I'm running Word 2002
(10.5815.4219) SP2.)
A couple hours ago I opened a large Word file which I've
been working on for months now, and opened hundreds of
times in the pastwithout error. To my considerable
surprise, I found that the body font of the document had
been converted to Wingdings, while the headers, bullets
etc remained in their familiar Courier New, Times New
Roman and Helvetica. (I *believe* the body font was
originally Georgia, but am not certain of this.)
Also, another section in a table had been mysteriously
converted to Symbol ( Greek letters).
My surprise turned to shock when I changed the font via
the Style Manager, from Wingdings to Times New Roman.
Now the entire body of the document was square boxes,
with only footnote reference numbers left unscathed.
Highlighting this boxed text and hitting Ctrl+Spacebar
made no difference.
I also noticed that when I highlighted the Wingdings
text, the highlight would not behave as usual and
highlight word by word; rather, it could only highlight
whole paragraphs at a time. Word was clearly acting very
sluggish, too, and it took a long time for the
cursor/prompt to move around.
After a bit of fiddling, I noticed that my clipboard
manager, ClipCache, was able to convert the wingdings
back into comprehensible letters, by clipping a piece of
the text and hitting either "MIME nn codes to ASCII"
or "MIME =nn codes to ASCII" buttons. However, all
footnotes were lost.
I tried saving the doc in a variety of alternative
formats, and noticed the following oddity. When trying
to save in Word 6.0 format, I got a dialog box warning me
that "Saving as word 6.0, Some of the features in this
document aren't supportd by Word 6.0/95". Strangely,
further down in this box botht he "Summary" of the
features and the "Number of Times" were both given in
Wingdings, not comprehensible text, as if an "internal
font" of Word (forgive my ignorance) had been somehow
changed to Wingdings.
After rummaging around on the Knowledge Base, I
found "Microsoft Knowledge Base Article - 290978", which
covers the following problem "WD 2002: Symbol Characters
Are Changed to Box Characters." There was a macro
attached, and I ran it, first on a sample block of
Wingdings, then on the whole doc. It succeeded in
restoring the Wingdings to Times New Roman, and
preserving the footnotes, but formatting is a mess --
quotation marks both single and double are turned into
little boxes, etc. This is by no means a fixed document.
Other data points/clues:
I have installed only one new program recently, a disk-
indexing program called X1. It installed and runs
normally, as far as I can see.
I said I'd opened this doc many times w/o error, but this
is not quite true. 2-3 times I noticed that one of the
fonts had changed to Symbol (Greek), or that the bullet
symbol had gone to a square box. This was easily fixed
via the Style Manager.
It was possible to convert some, but not all, of the
Greek text by highlighting it and hitting Ctrl+spacebar.
So my URGENT questions:
1) What on earth happened?
2) How do I fix the existing document without the
elaborate, and in some cases destructive, use of the MS
macro?
3) And perhaps more importantly: How do I keep it from
happening again???
love some guidance. (I'm running Word 2002
(10.5815.4219) SP2.)
A couple hours ago I opened a large Word file which I've
been working on for months now, and opened hundreds of
times in the pastwithout error. To my considerable
surprise, I found that the body font of the document had
been converted to Wingdings, while the headers, bullets
etc remained in their familiar Courier New, Times New
Roman and Helvetica. (I *believe* the body font was
originally Georgia, but am not certain of this.)
Also, another section in a table had been mysteriously
converted to Symbol ( Greek letters).
My surprise turned to shock when I changed the font via
the Style Manager, from Wingdings to Times New Roman.
Now the entire body of the document was square boxes,
with only footnote reference numbers left unscathed.
Highlighting this boxed text and hitting Ctrl+Spacebar
made no difference.
I also noticed that when I highlighted the Wingdings
text, the highlight would not behave as usual and
highlight word by word; rather, it could only highlight
whole paragraphs at a time. Word was clearly acting very
sluggish, too, and it took a long time for the
cursor/prompt to move around.
After a bit of fiddling, I noticed that my clipboard
manager, ClipCache, was able to convert the wingdings
back into comprehensible letters, by clipping a piece of
the text and hitting either "MIME nn codes to ASCII"
or "MIME =nn codes to ASCII" buttons. However, all
footnotes were lost.
I tried saving the doc in a variety of alternative
formats, and noticed the following oddity. When trying
to save in Word 6.0 format, I got a dialog box warning me
that "Saving as word 6.0, Some of the features in this
document aren't supportd by Word 6.0/95". Strangely,
further down in this box botht he "Summary" of the
features and the "Number of Times" were both given in
Wingdings, not comprehensible text, as if an "internal
font" of Word (forgive my ignorance) had been somehow
changed to Wingdings.
After rummaging around on the Knowledge Base, I
found "Microsoft Knowledge Base Article - 290978", which
covers the following problem "WD 2002: Symbol Characters
Are Changed to Box Characters." There was a macro
attached, and I ran it, first on a sample block of
Wingdings, then on the whole doc. It succeeded in
restoring the Wingdings to Times New Roman, and
preserving the footnotes, but formatting is a mess --
quotation marks both single and double are turned into
little boxes, etc. This is by no means a fixed document.
Other data points/clues:
I have installed only one new program recently, a disk-
indexing program called X1. It installed and runs
normally, as far as I can see.
I said I'd opened this doc many times w/o error, but this
is not quite true. 2-3 times I noticed that one of the
fonts had changed to Symbol (Greek), or that the bullet
symbol had gone to a square box. This was easily fixed
via the Style Manager.
It was possible to convert some, but not all, of the
Greek text by highlighting it and hitting Ctrl+spacebar.
So my URGENT questions:
1) What on earth happened?
2) How do I fix the existing document without the
elaborate, and in some cases destructive, use of the MS
macro?
3) And perhaps more importantly: How do I keep it from
happening again???