Hi Gene,
I'm not certain I can help with this, but... Which version
of Windows and of Word is this?
In the Control Panel there's a place where one can set the
Keyboard Language / Input. Exactly where that is depends on
the version of Windows, but perhaps you can find it? In
there you can see which keyboard languages and layouts are
installed for your machine. My best guess would be that she
pressed a keyboard combination like Shift+Alt to change the
keyboard.
OTOH, this doesn't match your description that copying
Normal.dot got rid of the behavior. If this is the case (and
not just a coincidence) then the more likely explantion
would be that some Addin (macro) changed the keyboard
assignments. These can be saved in Normal.dot (but can also
be saved elsewhere).
But the behavior you describe sounds so much like a
particular keyboard layout that I'd be inclined to say this
is the main cause. Ahhh, of course! Along with checking the
installed keyboard layouts, also go to Tools/Options/Edit
and see if automatic keyboard layout recognition is
activated. I'll bet this is what caused the keyboard to
change layouts to one available in Windows (and the related
language also probably activated in the Microsoft Office
Language Settings tool).
My wife apparently changed the keyboard format where
typing a questions mark results in a ~. If you hit
backspace, the ~ goes away and the question mark
appears. This happened when using the english and
spanish languages. Not sure what she did to cause this.
To correct the problem, I copies my normal.dot file into
her normal.dot. This corrected the problem. Can someone
tell me what she did and how I could have corrected it
without changing the normal.dot file?
Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Sep
30 2003)
http://www.word.mvps.org
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