What sort of glitch makes a computer change its Microsoft Word settings without being asked to?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Yesterday I clicked on an email in Gmail, turns out it was suspect, Gmail then immediately logged me out of my account and sent a “suspicious activity detected, may be malware, you have been logged out for your own protection” message to my backup Gmail account.

I ran a few Bitdefender scans and my PC (Windows 11) came back clean each time.

But this morning two weird things happened:

  • My Microsoft Word now no longer replaces words like before. If I use the “replace” function to convert, say, “Wilderness” to “wilderness,” it will say “we have made 8 replacements” but every instance of “Wilderness” remains capitalized. In the past, it would convert it as requested.
  • Every time I exit a document, it will say, 'If you choose not to save, a temporary version of this file will remain available." It had never said that before.

I can’t think of a single reason why a malware (if that’s what causing this) would behave this way. I didn’t make any other changes to my system. Any guesses?

2

No idea what might cause something like that, but you might want to try running a repair and see if it helps:

3

It may be an upgrade. My Word 360 no longer displays the navigation pane when I hit Ctrl-F. Instead, a pane appears on the right and tries to search the Internet.

4

That search behavior is annoying, and pretty predictable with any major Word update. You have to change the keyboard shortcut definition from one kind of search (the sidebar search pane) to another kind of search (the original search dialog box). And expect Word to revert the next time Microsoft feels like it.