formatting lost from word v.X to 2004

[turtlebud]

I have office 2004 installed on two computers in my home - a powerbook
and a powermac. I was testing office 2004 on my powerbook and when I
felt that everything was okay, I installed it on my powermac. Problem
is, it didn't behave the same way on my desktop machine. Opening v.X
docs in word 2004 on the powerbook was fine - all the formatting seemed
to be retained. However, opening word v.X docs in 2004 on my desktop
machine yielded quite different results. I saw two main problems:

1. all my bullet points were turned into infinity signs
2. somehow the formatting changed slightly enough to push the text that
used to fit on one page onto a second page (the effect was amplified by
the fact that I had a page break on the bottom of the first page which
was not shifted to the second page)

Can anyone offer any suggestions on why this might be happened and what
I can do to fix it? The frustrating thing is that I believe this is
isolated to the install of 2004 on my desktop since word v.X works fine
on the desktop and v.X AND 2004 work fine on my laptop. Though I had
considered just reformatting my documents, I am reluctant to because
when I open the reformatted docs either in v.X or in 2004 on my laptop,
the formatting is off again. In other words, I think word 2004 on my
desktop is using some odd template to format my documents which no
other install of word is doing.

 

[CyberTaz]

The first issue is whether you have the same fonts on both systems. If
not that could account for most of your problems.

Secondly, are the systems set at the same resolution? This also can
cause some of the behavior you cited.

As far as templates, if there was a custom template used in the
creation of a document & that template file is not available when the
doc is opened on another system, the text may flow differently in many
cases. Normally, though, such things as margins, indents, tabs, styles,
etc. are carried with the doc.

Hope this is helpful |:>)

 

[mmmmark]

The first issue is whether you have the same fonts on both systems. If
not that could account for most of your problems.

Secondly, are the systems set at the same resolution? This also can
cause some of the behavior you cited.

As far as templates, if there was a custom template used in the
creation of a document & that template file is not available when the
doc is opened on another system, the text may flow differently in many
cases. Normally, though, such things as margins, indents, tabs, styles,
etc. are carried with the doc.

Hope this is helpful |:>)

Are they composing to the same printers? This could also explain the page
breaks.

 

[CyberTaz]

Valid concern from a printing perspective, but shouldn't have impact on
display unless min. margin settings are radically different. I got the
impression that the primary concern was screen display although
printing would also be effected. |:>)

 

[turtlebud]

yes, the fonts on the two systems are the same - at least the ones in
the library->fonts folder and the ms office 2004->office->fonts folder
are the same. I did a little digging into the formatting of the bullet
points and found that the symbol font used by word v.X seems to be
different from the symbol font used for word 2004 on the same system.
this seemed odd to me since both are running of the same library of
fonts and the office v.X folder doesn't contain the symbol font. I
took a screen shot of the word v.X keyboard mapping and the word 2004
keyboard mapping. The top is the word 2004 window and the bottom is
the word v.X window. Notice that the bullet point hilighted in the
bottom window is mapped to an infinity sign on top. So I guess the
question now is how do I determine which system font word 2004 is using
and why are the key mapping different?

http://home.earthlink.net/~my_yardsale/symbol_font_mapping.pdf

I also checked the page setup to see if the printers for formatting are
the same and they are. The other odd thing I noticed when I was
testing was that if I install office 2004 on a different partition (I
have one that I play around with running 10.3) and try to open the same
document, there are no problems with formatting of bullets.

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

I don't know. You might want to repost the question on the word-specific
group, there are a few more font experts there. Word 2004 is now Unicode,
Word X wasn't, they did change font versions, but I don't really understand
how it all works.

http://groups-beta.google.com/group/microsoft.public.mac.office.word

Since a different partition works, you might also try a new user. If a new
user works, running through these tests might fix the old user, or it might
be easier to just move over to the new user account.

Standard Troubleshooting Suggestions here:
http://word.mvps.org/MacWordNew/TroubleshootingIndex.htm
(hit refresh a few times in Safari, or use a different browser)

 

[turtlebud]

Good idea Daiya, will do.

In regards to you suggestion, I did try it with a different user on the
same partition and it displayed the same problems that I saw with the
formatting and the bullets which leads me to believe it's a problem
with some shared settings across users.

I'll also take a look at the mvps troubleshooting page. Thank you.

 

[turtlebud]

I found the problem. For some strange reason, word 2004 was referencing
a different font for the "symbol" font (which is uses for the bullets
and numbering). The tricky thing was that this font wasn't called
"symbol" so I couldn't really find it. The Font Book helped out in this
case cause when I went to the font book and looked at the Symbol font,
there were 3 versions of it. One of them was called ~MathType Fonts. I
don't know how it got in there, or why Word used that instead of the
regular Symbol font, but when I trashed that file, everything was
fixed. **YEAH**