I'm experiencing corruption problems on a couple of documents. The tail end of one of the documents now reads as follows:

'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST´ZOï1‑œVDÁ:08ã%)Ë(Ô²[MOE0Û!ê 'ÊWñ”Þ4`Ù¹‰Ó±�××¹°)(6˜e¾¹VÎ)½0ÓKj‑1T†ö¢Ï5ü¹FÅìå
¢<Ð; æ@Éäê”iNÆš¨¡9îÛ0É–Wê@Å€ÐH²¸;
‡ÅZâ
‡'
ÌSÈ«+Cºõ:Û¶K·¡�\t±
µðê*|'
EïÉÁíî˜ÙLçs'8NV±¶
ÓÊÙÃå"Ñ_}ì2F¢.ú�jåR¢ß
àTøîz©¨¼‑«iocØ°
–úÏEö³ª·;TN• *
ê—38{¶÷´Pëa0ãßÊÚƒúÅZxêÈqs¤YÆY5
ø &çEèV ÙÍ\yÈñâæÔ‚Û5#5ë.*š3p�*øÖÌøU¿¾³{YÌXÑ“¡¬ddðEóò4'


( It doesn't show up in the text quoted above, but there are several page breaks in there too ). The initial string of lines of A-Z are my own doing; when I first became aware of this problem, I inserted about twenty lines of this at the bottom of the document so that at least it would only be unnecessary text that would be affected. What I find really strange is that the document will do this after being opened; which is to say, today, for example, I've had the document open since this morning, gone back to it about half a dozen times, and most of those times there's been a new string of gibberish at the end!
Obviously the strings of alphabet at the end of the document are a workaround, but there must surely be some actual solution to the problem - particularly since I'm obviously not the only one to have experienced it ...?


... as an afterthought ... each time I go back to the document, it's at a different point than where I last left it ( often by a matter of several pages )!
... as another afterthought ... I've deleted all the gibberish above, and it's left me with a number 4 at the end of the strings of alphabet, which won't allow itself to be deleted no matter what I do!!


As a matter of interest, this post has been moved ( and paraphrased ) from what was previously a post which was eleven years old, the moderator quoting the fact that it's unlikely the original poster is still experiencing the same problem. To be fair, I imagine that's true, but at the same time, from what I've discovered whilst trawling the internet for a solution, it seems that other people certainly are. This suggests that it's still an ongoing problem, even if it does date back eleven years or more. At the time, it seemed to me to make more sense to post to the existing thread - given that the problem appears to be identical - rather than start a new one for the exact same purpose. At the very worst, I couldn't see what harm it would do; but if that was inappropriate, my apologies.

Try, using a copy, the solutions for Document Corruption.


Create a new document. In the old document, go to the beginning and copy everything up until the funny marks start. Paste into the new document.

Thank you for the suggestion. I've tried this; the first thing I realised is that you have to reset things like margins, page size and indents ( I don't know whether or not it's supposed to, but 'keep source formatting' doesn't seem to affect that ); given that it's quite a large document, I'm not sure whether or not it will prove viable to manually reset all these things throughout the entire course of the document, but in the meantime, I'll keep an eye on it and see whether the original problem re-occurs or not.
At any rate, thank you for the suggestion; I gather from what you say that the most likely cause in the first place was a corrupted document?

• Resetting margins beats retyping the whole thing.
• Use Styles for your formatting. They will take care of the indents.
• There should be very few margin adjustments in a document. See Margins and Indents in Word.
• See Basic Concepts of Microsoft Word - from Shauna Kelly

With regard to this and my other recent threads, lest it should be the case that I appear dismissive or unwilling to take advice, I should clarify a couple of things:

Quote:

"Resetting margins beats retyping the whole thing."

Only barely. The document referred to in this post is not far short of 200 pages long, and consists of numerous ( I literally don't know how many ) headings with paragraphs underneath. Even if every single one of those paragraphs were indented by the exact same amount, contained the exact same tab settings etc., that's a lot of re-setting margins. Yes, technically, of course it is quicker than re-typing the whole thing; but still far from desirable. If there are in fact no other options, there are no other options; but you can see why I'm not that eager to embrace it.


Until reading that statement below, that thought had never occurred to me. In common, I dare say, with many people - certainly a majority, I would suggest - I've learned to use Microsoft Office as I've gone along, because I've had to. If I'd sat down and read the instructions ( were there instructions...? ) some twenty-odd years ago, before typing my first document, bearing in mind the learning curve renews and changes with each updated version, I'd never have got any actual work done. One might argue that I wouldn't be having some of the problems that I'm now experiencing; that may or may not be true - hindsight is 20 / 20 - but the situation now is what it is. Which brings me on to ...


This has more of a bearing on my other post about delays while typing etc., but by way of addressing the point:

Firstly, once again, hindsight is 20 / 20. If I'd been aware of this twenty years ago, I might have done things differently - although I do say 'might' ( see below ) - but I wasn't. If I typed a paragraph and it needed to be formatted the same as the one three paragraphs earlier, I used Ctrl+shift+C and Ctrl+shift+V, and Bob was my uncle: job done - quick, straightforward and very simple. It never occurred to me that doing this once, twice, five hundred times, would create difficulties further down the line, because why would it?

Those more knowledgeable than I, which covers a lot of ground, may know the answer to that question; but right up to around a week and a half ago, it's never been apparent to me that there even was a question. Which brings me on to ...

Secondly, thinking now about the document that gave rise to my other question about time-lags and delays while typing and copying formats etc.: that particular document is well over 300 pages long, and because this is a document that will never need to be printed out, each of those pages is 345mm wide x 300mm high. ( Is there anything wrong with that ...?... I don't know - I can only say that there hasn't been up to now, in the fifteen-odd years that I've been using that particular document ). At an educated guess - for obvious reasons, I'm not going to actually count - there are maybe fifteen different levels of indent, at least half a dozen different types of bullets, at least half a dozen different font colours, half a dozen font sizes and probably three or four different fonts. The reader's jaw may be dropping and their eyebrows raising by now, but again, I'm constrained to point out that until around a week and a half ago, this has never once been a problem.

However - history aside - let's assume that I now decide that rather than the ( hitherto ) five-second action of copying and pasting formats, I want to set individual styles for each different format. Taking into account the stats above, as the saying goes, you do the math. I don't even know if you can have that many different styles - with my luck, I'd get 99% of the way through the operation before discovering you can't - but let's say hypothetically that you can. Each of those styles has it's own button on the ribbon, except of course that the ribbon only displays eight style buttons; so I have to bring up the list of styles and find the correct one ( Heaven alone knows what sort of nomenclature I'd use for these ). Generally, I'm a keyboard-shortcut guy rather than a mouse-click guy; but even if there were enough available keyboard shortcuts that aren't already in use for other things, so much of my memory would be involved in mentally storing that information that I'd forget my own name.

Assuming, hypothetically, that I were to embrace all of the above, and take on the - let's face it - humungous job of allocating a style to each individual one of the permutations of paragraph formatting, combined with the hideously cumbersome job of locating each style each time I want to format a paragraph, that would take longer than simply twiddling my thumbs while the copy-and-paste-formatting operation works - which it did, perfectly, up to about a week and a half ago, which is where we came in.

The turning-to-gibberish problem only affects a couple of documents; the typing-lag ( plus arbitrarily switching from one document to another, plus taking up to 30 seconds to open a document ) applies to several, if not all, of the documents I work on daily. Whatever it was that caused this problem, that's what I'm looking to solve; although using styles - if I lived long enough to go through the process above - might be a perfectly effective workaround, all I want to do is exactly what I've been doing for the last fifteen or so years without a problem: use copy-and-paste-formatting. It's not like this has got progressively worse over a period of time as the documents have got longer and more complex; two weeks ago it worked perfectly, and now it doesn't.

As I say, I only say all this to make clear why I'm not immediately jumping at styles to solve the problem; I'm not complaining or criticising the response - I'm grateful for any and all responses - but I hope you can understand why using styles to solve this particular problem in this particular context seems rather like buying a new car to fix a stuck window.

Any ideas as to how I can make Microsoft Office behave exactly the way it did up to a couple of weeks ago would be very gratefully received.

Read the first 20 paragraphs here:
Importance of Styles in Word
or, read Yet Another "Use Styles" Verbal Beating! by Dian Chapman, MVP which is almost 20 years old.

If every paragraph in your book is formatted differently, I certainly would not want to read it. 90% or more of your text should be in a single style.

Styles are about having paragraphs that have the same type of content formatted exactly the same, and more. Documents formatted using direct formatting are far more complex under the hood than those formatted using styles. Opening and saving them takes longer. Moving text takes longer.

Read and take to heart the series of short tutorials: Basic concepts of Microsoft Word: An introduction by Shauna Kelly, MVP Even though written before the Ribbon version, they still apply. If you need the Ribbon version, start here: Basic Concepts of Microsoft Word - from Shauna Kelly

I guarantee you will recover the time you spend reading it within the first week and be ahead of the game from then on. Like me, you will kick yourself for not learning to use styles earlier.

Applying styles can be very easy. They can be in your Quick Styles Gallery. That link is to a short tutorial on styles. You can attach keyboard shortcuts to them.

As to your last request, Michael Fox borrowed the DeLorean and has not returned it.

Bottom line:

1. You are working on a big and important project.
2. You have a lot of work ahead of you.
3. You can make it quicker and easier by learning about the tools you are using.
4. Or not.

Right now you are in the position of someone who has started taking apart the engine on a car and put it back together without a manual and it is not working. It is time to read the manual.