Formatting gremlin

C

Clyde Soles

No matter what I try, I cannot exorcise a gremlin from a Word 2008 document.
It's a fairly long (100k) word manuscript that I have outlined with 5 levels
of headings.

In a couple of places, Word absolutely refuses to accept the heading level
that I assign to some passages. For example, I make it heading 5 or body
text and it works okay and saves okay. But when I open the document after it
has been closed, the exact same passages revert to heading 1.

I've tried to clear formatting on the text, changing to different levels,
looking for hidden codes. I try to cancel formatting when the document opens
but that doesn't work. There doesn't appear to be anything unusual about
these sections. But they will not stay at the level I tell them.

It's frustrating to say the least. Any suggestions?
 
M

mdh

The standard way to try and save a suspect file is to copy everything
in the document except the last paragraph mark and paste into a new
document. Does this document behave any better?

Also, make a copy of your document and cut out everything except one
paragraph of offending text and save this. Does it have similar
behavior?

Matt
 
J

John McGhie

Hi Clyde:

Yes, I'm with Matt on this one -- that's a classic sign of a corrupt
document. Your numbering has corrupted, I suggest, so the document will be
very instable.

Matt's first suggestion should cure it -- let us know if it doesn't.

Cheers


No matter what I try, I cannot exorcise a gremlin from a Word 2008 document.
It's a fairly long (100k) word manuscript that I have outlined with 5 levels
of headings.

In a couple of places, Word absolutely refuses to accept the heading level
that I assign to some passages. For example, I make it heading 5 or body
text and it works okay and saves okay. But when I open the document after it
has been closed, the exact same passages revert to heading 1.

I've tried to clear formatting on the text, changing to different levels,
looking for hidden codes. I try to cancel formatting when the document opens
but that doesn't work. There doesn't appear to be anything unusual about
these sections. But they will not stay at the level I tell them.

It's frustrating to say the least. Any suggestions?

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Sydney, Australia. mailto:[email protected]
 
C

Clyde Soles

The only thing that seems to work is delete the offending text. Without it,
reopening the document everything is fine with the outline.

I've tried cutting the text, pasting it in a new document, and saving it as
a text file. In theory that should have everything stripped, right? But
copying it back into the original creates the same evil behavior.

What next? Print, scan with OCR, then paste?

Really don't want to save the whole document as a text file and lose all
formatting. It's way too big to contemplate redoing all the formatting. And
somehow I suspect after all that, Word would still bite me.

Thanks
 
J

John McGhie

Hi Clyde:

Don't panic. This is a small local corruption in a few paragraphs in that
document.

1) Cut the text and paste it into a spare document.

2) Save As the main document under a new file name. Close it and re-open
it to clean it out.

Now save the spare document as "Web Page" and check the the box that says
"Save only display information". Again, close the document to clean it out.

This re-expresses the file in a different logical format, and in doing so,
forces the corrupted bit to be re-constructed.

Now open both, copy the text and paste it back in. You will have to
re-apply the styles when you get the text pasted into the new main document.

That should fix it. If not, you can try again, saving both documents out to
RTF format, then bringing them back to .docx. The problem with RTF is that
it makes a very accurate copy of the document, usually, preserving the
problems as well.

Hope this helps


The only thing that seems to work is delete the offending text. Without it,
reopening the document everything is fine with the outline.

I've tried cutting the text, pasting it in a new document, and saving it as
a text file. In theory that should have everything stripped, right? But
copying it back into the original creates the same evil behavior.

What next? Print, scan with OCR, then paste?

Really don't want to save the whole document as a text file and lose all
formatting. It's way too big to contemplate redoing all the formatting. And
somehow I suspect after all that, Word would still bite me.

Thanks

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Sydney, Australia. mailto:[email protected]
 
D

David

Clyde Soles said:
No matter what I try, I cannot exorcise a gremlin from a Word 2008 document.
It's a fairly long (100k) word manuscript that I have outlined with 5 levels
of headings.

In a couple of places, Word absolutely refuses to accept the heading level
that I assign to some passages. For example, I make it heading 5 or body
text and it works okay and saves okay. But when I open the document after it
has been closed, the exact same passages revert to heading 1.

I've tried to clear formatting on the text, changing to different levels,
looking for hidden codes. I try to cancel formatting when the document opens
but that doesn't work. There doesn't appear to be anything unusual about
these sections. But they will not stay at the level I tell them.

It's frustrating to say the least. Any suggestions?

Have you tried doing a 'save as' save with the document as you want it?

while I am not sure if it is still the case, with an ordinary save word
used to just 'top up' the document, leaving all the original stuff
there, but not showing.

With a save as it saves the doc just as it is when you did the save, and
without all the previous junk

David
 
J

John McGhie

Hi David:

You are quite correct -- Save As is one way of removing obsolete editing
changes from a file. These days closing and re-opening the file should have
the same effect. I say "should" because there is a bug that may prevent it
from working.

However, the original poster's problem is a corrupt list, or list template.
Save As won't fix those, but Save as Web Page will :)

Within a Word document, bullets and numbering are the same thing: each
paragraph simply contains a "pointer" -- a hexadecimal number that is the
byte offset from the top of the file -- of a row in a look-up table. The
table row (at the end of the document, it's non-displayable and occurs below
the last paragraph mark) contains the actual formatting instructions for the
list.

If the List Template is bad, he needs to re-build that table. If the "List"
is bad, he needs to re-create the pointers. Saving as a web page does both.

Cheers


Have you tried doing a 'save as' save with the document as you want it?

while I am not sure if it is still the case, with an ordinary save word
used to just 'top up' the document, leaving all the original stuff
there, but not showing.

With a save as it saves the doc just as it is when you did the save, and
without all the previous junk

David

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Sydney, Australia. mailto:[email protected]
 
C

Clive Huggan

John, can you tell me why, when one copies the text of a bulleted paragraph
(but not the bullet or paragraph mark), then do Paste Special =>
Unformatted, a bullet is included (as a character, naturally) and to prevent
the bullet being paste one has to ensure that the first letter is excluded
from the selection?

Clive
=====
 
C

CyberTaz

I can't explain why it "did", but in 2008 it no longer does :)

Regards |:>)
Bob Jones
[MVP] Office:Mac
 
J

John McGhie

Hi Clive:

Because "that's the way it works" :)

This is an occasionally irritating function of versions of Word prior to
Word 2007. When pasting as Plain Text, Word examines all the formatting
attributes that apply to the text included in the selection, finds the
bullet or number, resolves it to the closest equivalent character, and adds
that too.

In Word 2007, there is an option you can set to specify whether you want
this to happen or not. I suspect that might appear on the Mac in Word 2010.

Cheers


John, can you tell me why, when one copies the text of a bulleted paragraph
(but not the bullet or paragraph mark), then do Paste Special =>
Unformatted, a bullet is included (as a character, naturally) and to prevent
the bullet being paste one has to ensure that the first letter is excluded
from the selection?

Clive
=====

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Sydney, Australia. mailto:[email protected]
 
C

Clive Huggan

Thanks, Bob and John!

CH
===

Hi Clive:

Because "that's the way it works" :)

This is an occasionally irritating function of versions of Word prior to
Word 2007. When pasting as Plain Text, Word examines all the formatting
attributes that apply to the text included in the selection, finds the
bullet or number, resolves it to the closest equivalent character, and adds
that too.

In Word 2007, there is an option you can set to specify whether you want
this to happen or not. I suspect that might appear on the Mac in Word 2010.

Cheers
 

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