optional hypens showing as dashes

[GinnyB]

In Word 2007 - when I copy an existing portion of a document to a new file (I
use paste special to remove all formatting because I work across several
documents with different style sheets and don't want to carry them into my
new document), any hyphen inserted in the first document converts to a dash
or the symbol that shows for an optional hyphen when you have paragraph marks
showing, which then creates typos in the new document. This appears to be a
glitch in the latest upgrades to Word as this never occurred in the past.

Has anyone else come across this problem and is there a solution or patch? I
have stopped using hypens (which leaves me with more widows and orphans than
I like) because I can't take the time to strip the hypens out of the new
document.

Any help is appreciated. Thanks.

 

[Stefan Blom]

Are you pasting as unformatted text? If so, I think what you ar seeing is to
be expected. I can reproduce the same behavior in Word 2003 as well.