Odd brackets appearing in my Word docs

[Pitch]

For the past month, many of my new Word (2004 v11.3) docs have this
odd bracket that appears around text at different times. It looks
fairly similar to the classic ] and [ brackets. I certainly didn't
type them in, and they can't be selected, deleted, copied, or printed.
When I copy and paste these docs into, say, TextEdit, these brackets
disappear. But they usually reappear once I paste the text back into a
new Word doc.

Any ideas what these are?

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

They are bookmarks.

Word 2004 users have reported spontaneous bookmark generation on copy
and paste. It doesn't happen to everyone, and no one knows what exactly
is causing it. On my machine, it went away when I removed the
Pasteboard module of You Control, and it's possible that other clipboard
utilities help cause it (though Butler's is fine here).

You can hide them via Word | Preferences | View, uncheck "bookmarks."

You can delete them--search this newsgroups for a macro from Kristina to
delete OLE bookmarks to delete them all at once.

They don't cause any harm in Word documents, but are a bit aggravating.
If you convert to HTML, I think they show up as anchors, and are annoying.

 

[Pitch]

Excellent, Daiya, both for the pref turn off, and for pointing out
that the problem could be coming from a clipboard utility. I just
installed a freeware one called PTHPasteboard, so that could be the
issue. In any case, I never use them, so turning off the pref did the
trick. Many thanks!