Hi all



First, I'm on a PC, using Word through Office 365, and I just upgraded to Windows 10 last weekend.

I've been working on a manuscript over the last few weeks and I'm very nearly done. But when I go in to look for errors, I find Word has added things like "68nsavoury68" or "27umoured27". It's very bizarre. At first I thought I had inadvertently cut and paste from somewhere else, but after I clean up and resave (and save another copy to a flash drive as a backup), I go back in and find new inserts, like "35ialled35". (Note the British spellings too.)

Does anyone know what's going on? This is a client document and I'm worried that something will insert itself in the final that I send off as finished.

Thanks for any help.

Julie Klein

You are saving to a flash drive. Doing this is destroying your document!

Word does not work with flash drives. You need to act as if you do not have any flash drives while you are using Word. You can use Windows to copy any document on a flash drive to your hard drive, use Word with it, and when Word is closed, copy it back if you wish.

This means:

• Do not open a document on a flash drive from Word or with Word.
• Do not save a document to a flash drive from within Word.
• Do not print a Word document while it is on a flash drive.

Working within Word on documents that are on removable media will cause document corruption.

So bizarre! But what do I know? Thanks, Charles. I'll go back to copying through Windows (or Dropbox, which is my file management system).

BTW, when I copy a document this way, I get a message that it will be copied "without properties." I agree, but I don't really know what it means. Do you?

Julie Klein

I think there's more going on here than just saving to a flash drive. That's quite OK provided you remove the drive 'safely' afterwards. If you have removed unsafely, though, you may have corrupted it that way; either way the document appears to have acquired some serious corruption.

I suggest you 'repair' the document by inserting a new, empty, paragraph at the very end, copying everything except that new paragraph to a new document based on the same template (headers & footers may need to be copied separately), closing the old document and saving the new one over it. You may still have some cleaning-up to do afterwards, but that is better than losing the lot - which is what you may now be at risk of.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Thank you, Paul.

Julie Klein