junk characters in Ms word

[Clay Aiken]

I am using windows vista & was operating Ms Word. While opening the document i just got juck charaters written on it i tried to delete it but was not able to do it. other application of office works perfectly.

Can anyone help me with the solution....??

[chroma]

I was having same problem when working on a project. My document was a MS Word 2000 and the client run it on Word 2007. Many characters came out as little boxes. Eventually, everything was fixed when they run it on Word 2003.

Which version of word are you using?

[ThoMas321]

See out the suspicious characters which take more than a byte. Western protocol says that characters shall only take up 1 byte and if not dressed properly violates the law as western ID scanners would treat them as two separate characters leading to identity issues.

You can force all the characters to be dressed in the same cut (some people called them fonts) or you can write a conversion routine to do an auto sweep of your land.

[Macarenas]

It's a character Encoding problem. Older versions of software will often times use a default character encoding, but not state which encoding is used in the file itself. This is the case with older versions of Microsoft software, they will default to different encodings for their Chinese and English verisons, but fail to state which encoding is used in the files themselves. Even Windows XP has this problem if you save it as "plain" text instead of unicode text.

For the short term just use RTF or save it as Unicode text. RTF will almost always work as it forces it to explicitly state the encoding format. I'm not familiar with Word 2003 format, but I'm betting it does the same and requires it to explicitly state the encoding format. For the long term I would look into using software that supports more open standards like the OpenDocument format.

As for the mysterious e-mails, it's the same problem. I'm betting if you change the view to a certain encoding that garbled text will become Chinese. For Firefox and IE6 I think it's something like "View > Encoding > Chinese", IE7 I think it's under "Page > encoding".

[Lauren Bacall]

Even myself having a problem with ( â€TM). Here is where it occurs:

In Microsoft Word, the apostrophe is displayed as a circle with an inward leaning hook on the right side. Open Microsoft word and enlarge an apostrophe to see an apostrophe displayed.

The problem occurs when a document in Microsoft word is copied & pasted into another application. Instead of displaying the apostrophe correctly, the apostrophe is displayed as this character: ( â€TM ) For example in the contraction: don't, is instead displayed as donâ€TMt.

If you noticed in the body of this document, the apostrophe is displayed as a small mark ( ' ), not the full circle & hook as used in Microsoft Word.

The question is how do I change, within Microsoft Word, the apostrophe to be displayed as a simple mark ( ' ) and not the full circle & hook default Microsoft Word uses?

[Raine]

The entire document is a field. Press Alt+F9 to see what sort of field it
is.

OR

It's hard to say what happened without knowing any configuration details or
steps to reproduce. My guess is that you have a virus scanner integrated with Outlook which mangles your email upon sending. Disable/uninstall this integration and try again.

OR

If it is not caused directly by anything that the client has installed (3rd
party addins), then you'll have to add debugging code to your custom
application to find out at which point exactly it gets added. Then go from
there.