How To Get Rid of all Changes Created by Accidental ControlCharacters?

[Charlie-Boo]

Hello,

When I am using MS word, occasionally apparently I hit some control
key and the display gets all messed up - funny characters appear, line
start in the middle of the page instead of the left side etc.

How do I get rid of all of the strange formatting?

I saved it to TEXT to get rid of them, but they still show up.

If I can't fix it I'll have to type it all back in.

Charlie

 

[Charlie-Boo]

Now when I open good documents they're all screwed up with weird
characters etc.
(Control Z doesn't work.)

Do I have to reinstall Word to get it back to normal?

Can I tell it to start and load all documents with normal formatting?

Can I have it ingore control characters that produce strange
formatting?

Charlie

 

[Amish]

Can you describe these "strange" characters?
Do they print out when you print your document?
Does one of them look like a backwards P (like this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilcrow
)?

 

[markg]

Can you describe these "strange" characters?
Do they print out when you print your document?
Does one of them look like a backwards P (like thishttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilcrow
)?

Could you have turned on Show all formatting option?

Tools-->Options-->View-->Formatting marks-->All

Though I have to admit I've never seen this cause lines to start in
the wrong place.

The other possibility is you have another language installed and keep
hitting the ctrl keys to switch languages. I have that problem with
cyrillic sometimes.