1. I'd feel s-o-o restricted without a plain-text editor – apart from anything else, it's often a very good thing to focus on content rather than formatting. Try Notepad++, or if you're ready for a paradigm shift go straight for Vim
2. While you're still in Word, the fact that ctrl + spacebar didn't do anything suggests a gremlin in the paragraph style. The screenshot shows the standard Lorum ipsum:

• • first, with a local override to display it with the Windows Symbols font – looks Greek, indeed, but isn't
  • second, after selecting the paragraph and using ctrl + spacebar to clear the override and display the paragraph in the default font for the style

So my guess would still be, either there's a local font override applied or the style definition for the affected paragraph(s) has mysteriously acquired Symbol as its font. The latter would explain why ctrl+spacebar does nothing you can see.

Attached Images

symbolFont.png (96.7 KB, 11 views)