Blank and/or garbled docs - very large fonts

J

Jazz

VERY strange problem I have not seen in the past.

I work on a help desk as MS Office support. I have 2 clients from the same
site with Word documents saved to a network server. The document properties
show the number of characters and different sizes of files - there is
obviously data in their files - but when opened, the pages appear to be
blank. I tried all views, made sure TOOLS>OPTIONS showed hidden text, and
the other appropriate settings. I couldn't get anything to select by using
ctrl+A, show/hide revealed nothing. It wasn't until I placed the doc in
Master Doc view that I noticed (after scrolling down)that the fonts were
appearing to be 500pts large(est.) but the zoom was set to 100% and the
formatting toolbar reflected no font or style or font size. Print preview
shows nothing.

All the letters of the words are showing on top of one another as though the
kerning was set to a negative number. I have never seen Word do this - we
are in Office XP SP3 on an XP box. I was not able to resize the fonts to
make them appear normal - it is as though Words normal tools are useless to
reformat the docs.

This is affecting every single one of these user's files on the server -
we're talking years worth of work. I suspect more calls to come - anyone
seen or heard of something like this? The only new installation/upgrade to
user's machines was the patch for the ZOTOB worm.
 
J

Jazz

Truthfully, haven't tried that, but I'll connect to that server and test on
my box - I have the same system setup.
 
C

Chip Orange

Could you offer them the follow haiku that I came across:

Yesterday it worked.

Today it is not working.

Windows is like that.



If that isn't accepted, does the file recovery/repair option of the file
open dialog help at all?



Chip
 

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