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Box Characters in Word

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by bknapp

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Believe it or not I still have a client using office 97. I also know this forum is dedicated to Office 2000 and better. If anyone out there has the answer it is simply appreciated. When my client opens a Word document across his network some of the text shows as box characters... only on some of the workstations. I realize the most common reason for this is an absence of the proper font file on the local machine. But I've standardized all of the font files on all of the workstations. I'vealso checked version... the item is saved in the most updated version for Office 97. I cannot figure out why only some workstation... I cannot find the difference, the one setting, toggle or omission that is causing this on the affected machines.

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by scott.heath

Does the file reside on a Netware server? I have seen problems, although not this one, with files residing on Netware servers with certain versions of the Novell Client. If you copy the document to the hard drive then open does the same thing happen?

by carollong

I've seen these symptoms 4 times in different places. Not sure which one you have, so I'll give you an outline of each which might help you track the problem.

Earlier versions of Word allowed you to select if the fonts should be used based on the printer driver installed or the fonts installed on the PC. This caused some problems when different users had different printers installed. The documents and the printer drivers disagreed about what a font meant and the users got junk because Word selected a random font to display. (This may be pre-Office 97.)

Alternatively, the Windows or Office version installed was set up for a different language (even if they are now all one language, some of the original defaults seem to "stick") and the font used was not available for that language, so Word pick a random one. It was similar to that described in http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;163813 We even saw it between UK English and US English.

On one machine the font files had been corrupted and wouldn't work for new documents. Uninstall and install them fresh.

I regret to say there was another case - we didn't try to solve it. Our work round was to just use Arial - we knew that would work for everyone.

It is worth making sure all the service packs and patches from MS have been installed on all the machines. We had a related problems when the Euro currency was introduced some patches were in but not all and each PC was very slightly different -this meant some fonts gave odd characters on different machines. It took ages to track down.

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