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Word text myseriously changes direction

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3 replies

by dungeonrat

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One of my users reports that in MS Word the text suddenly changes direction from LTR to RTL as she types. We can fix each incidence manually but can't figure out why it's happening. She's using only the default styles contained in the normal.dot and our firm.dot, which are both locked down on our network via Citrix, and she hasn't made any manual edits to the house styles. Oddly, both she and I show checkboxes to go from LTR/RTL text in Formatting/Paragraph, but my other users do not. Has anyone run across anything like this?

3 replies

by amberhaze

Where are your MS office patches sitting at? I would suggest making sure you have all the office patches installed as I have seen this behavior on a computers which have had Office SP3 installed via auto-update while the earlier patches were not completely installed properly.

by dungeonrat

All SPs installed on the network. Note that because we use Citrix all users access MS Office from the centralized servers, not from their local stations, and no other user (out of 186) are having this problem. In fact, no other users seem to have the function enabled except the problem user and me, after I opened one of her malfunctioning docs. I've also verified that it's not unique to a particular server.

by nilt

Hehe; I've seen this before. It happens when the user hits the rarely used yet poorly designed keyboard shortcuts for this. Ctrl+Right Shift activates R>L and Ctrl+Left Shift sets L>R. It could also happen, I suppose, when there?s a funky keyboard but I?ve never seen that one.

When I supported Office apps at Microsoft years ago we had this happen twice to my knowledge. Once it was a customer who typed absurdly fast (over 120wpm ? sounded odd on the phone) and was on a new keyboard with different sized Ctrl keys. The other wasn?t my case personally but as I recall was an older lady who had issues with hitting multiple keys (or, if it were myself, fat fingers).

I?d suggest isolating the keyboard itself first as this is a trivially easy solution if you have a spare around. Also, try to see if the customer tends to have this happen around capital letters or when toggling bold, italics, etc via KB shortcut. That?s when they?d typically be hitting the keys. Hope this helps; it?s been a while since I heard of anything like it myself and I remember it driving me nuts on my own case. That was a remote session, though, so it?s harder sometimes to diagnose than on site.

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