Marching Red Ants in Word 2007

[Cody]

I realize that the special fonts are no longer available in Word 2007 and
that you can copy from an earlier version and the effects will still
function. How do you turn them off in word 2007? Everytime I open a NEW
word 2007 document, the font style has the marching red ants. No matter what
I do I can't delete it, turn it off, tab or enter away from it. I always
have to open an existing document and delete its contents to get a clean word
document.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

This is exactly why Word developers are so loath to remove old, unused
functions. If you don't provide a way to turn them on, then there's no way
to turn them off when they accidentally surface. See
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/AppErrors/BlankDocNotBlank.htm for approaches to a
solution. If you haven't extensively customized Normal.dotm, you can just
rename Normal.dotm to get a fresh one. Otherwise, perhaps someone will be
able to provide the snippet of VBA that's required to turn this off in
Normal.dotm (opened for editing).

 

[Jay Freedman]

Here are the steps for removing the ants from Normal.dotm without losing any
other customizations:

With the Normal.dotm template opened for editing, press Alt+F11 to open the VBA
editor. Press Ctrl+G to open the Immediate window in the editor, paste in the
following line, and press Enter:

ActiveDocument.Range.Font.Animation = wdAnimationNone

Close the editor. In the body of Normal.dotm, type a space and then backspace to
remove it, which "dirties" the template to make Word know that it needs to be
saved. Save it and close it, and try a new document.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so all
may benefit.