I am experiencing two freaky things in MS Word 97 for Windows and I think they might be related.
I compile a send a series of daily reports; each day’s report builds on the previous day’s. So, creative guy that I am, I name the first day’s “Report - Day 1,” the second is “Report - Day 2” and so on.
On Day 3, I open “Report - Day 2,” make the changes, then save it as “Report - Day =3.” Here is where the two odd things come in:
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[li]When I finish making the changes that turn #2 into #3, I save it as #3 using the “Save As…” command. But, when I then close the app, I get a dialog box asking if I want to save the changes I made to #3. This is confusing because I usually close the app immediately after saving #3 as I just described.[/li][li]When I then re-open Report #3 to check something, I find that Word has inserted garbage characters in between some of the lines. It’s sticking blank lines into the first graf on each page - the line contains nothing but that funny square character (I can’t figure out how to get one into the post).[/li][/list=1]
So, those are my problems - quite frankly the second is more serious because those blank lines screw up countless little details in the document which contains lots of tabbed columns of numbers.
They definitely seem related. Does it do it with any document? Try to do it with several and see what happenes. It could be only that document (the originator of the chain) is corrupted.
BTW, I do the same often and I have a good habit: Open doc2, immediately and before making any changes save as doc3, now I start making changes on what is already doc 3. This saves you from the accident of overwriting doc2 when you have already made changes.
The only times I have seen behavior like this have involved saving documents in formats other than as Word Documents (occasionally, even when saving in old Word Document formats.) In that case, you will often get the “Do you want to save changes” dialog even if you have done absolutely nothing to the file in between.
I have not seen any cases where the kinds of changes to the file you describe have occured from saving and then reopening in a different format - but I would not be shocked if something like that happened - especially if you are saving to the format of a non-MS word processing program.
To be sure this is not the problem, make sure you check the “Save as type:” drop down menu when you use the “Save As” command.
If you have been saving in a different format, you might see if things work more reliably when saving as a .doc, or a .rtf, or a .txt. This of course assumes that you can do something like that - and that the choice of formats is not dictated by the need to share these reports on a network with people using other word processors, or some such.
Most of my Office was recently switched to Windows 2000(and hence Word 2000), but I’m still using Windows 95 and Word 97. When switching back and forth between platforms with the same document, I’ve sometimes noticed a few irregularities. Most of the changes aren’t obvious, but shading, tables, and charts seem to be the biggest differences.
So, is there any chance you switched versions of Word lately?
mblackwell: If I had that problem I would totally uninstall and reinstall Office.
Egad! That seems like a lot of work… I hope there’s another solution.
sailor: They definitely seem related. Does it do it with any document? Try to do it with several and see what happenes. It could be only that document (the originator of the chain) is corrupted.
I know that this problem happens with more than one document, and I now recall it happening on more than one machine! One of the Supervisors I manage has had similar problems.
Now that I think about it, both of us have seen this while using Word to edit reports generated in an app (I will call in XXX) that we use for operations in our call center. It generates reports in a read-only window and is designed to allow me to print them. If I only want 1 page out of a 50 page report, that seems wasteful, so I have taken to saving the reports as .txt files, opening them in Word and copy/pasting what I need.
That must be the link - XXX must somehow be including these hidden garbage characters in the reports. But how do I get Word to ignore them? Hmmm…
dorkbro and StephenG, thanks for the suggestions, but neither one applies. I must keep my reports in Word, and my entire office uses Word 97.
>> Now that I think about it, both of us have seen this while using Word to edit reports generated in an app (I will call in XXX) that we use for operations in our call center
It seems thaat would be the origin of the problem. The problem may be not with WORD but with XXX.