Missing symbols from PC to Mac

[macphile]

We're on Office X. The people we deal with are generally on PCs. They
send us scientific papers, and all too often, their symbols show up as
underscores on our end. Is there any way to fix this?

(Also, we've been having to trash our Normal templates to be able to
save files or customizations, but with one user, the fix didn't work.
Any ideas?)

Thanks.

 

[JE McGimpsey]

We're on Office X. The people we deal with are generally on PCs. They
send us scientific papers, and all too often, their symbols show up as
underscores on our end. Is there any way to fix this?

Upgrade to Word2004, which can display the Unicode symbols.

(Also, we've been having to trash our Normal templates to be able to
save files or customizations, but with one user, the fix didn't work.
Any ideas?)

Make sure that Word is closed when you trash the Normal template, then
empty the Trash before restarting Word.

But I'm not sure why you have to trash Normal in order to save files or
customizations...

 

[macphile]

Because we get an error--I think everyone does at some point, saying
the Normal template is read-only and it can't overwrite it. Usually it
happens when people try to save. It doesn't happen at first use, it's a
bit later. But it never happens again once the template's been
replaced. Don't know why it happens at all, though. It's off a disk
image used for the whole institution rather than a personal copy. Would
that be related?

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

Hi:

This is a classic mistake made by trainee System Administrators

They mistakenly believe they can get everyone in the company to use the same
Normal template. They can't: if they had read the first part of the
Microsoft Office Resource Kit, they would know that...

So they:

1) Put an read-only copy of Normal on the user's hard drive

2) Put a read-only copy of Normal on the Network

3) Share Normal with multiple users

4) Include Normal template in the Application directory with the Word
executable.

Any of those will mean users can't use Word properly until they replace the
Normal template.

Cheers

Because we get an error--I think everyone does at some point, saying
the Normal template is read-only and it can't overwrite it. Usually it
happens when people try to save. It doesn't happen at first use, it's a
bit later. But it never happens again once the template's been
replaced. Don't know why it happens at all, though. It's off a disk
image used for the whole institution rather than a personal copy. Would
that be related?

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410