Strange characters when converting from Word 2007 to Word 2003

[Tina]

Hi everyone,

I have a number of documents created and saved in Word 2007 (docx),
and I need to open and work with them in Word 2003. A number of weird
things seem to happen in conversion:

left double quotes convert to an uppercase A
right double quotes convert to an at symbol (@)
apostrophes convert to an equal sign (=)
the section symbol converts to an apostrophe

Some of these documents may have originated in WordPerfect before they
were converted to Word 2007. Has anyone seen this kind of thing, and
is there a solution? Search/replace is time-consuming, particularly
for the uppercase A.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

This is usually a sign that the document was at some point converted from
WordPerfect and the characters in question were in the WP Typographic
Symbols font. When that font is not installed, you will see the equivalents
in the Default Paragraph Font instead. Although you can "fix" the problem by
installing the font on your own system, that won't help if you send the
document to someone else, so ultimately you have to use Find and Replace to
replace the WP characters with native ones. Often if you copy the characters
in the text and use Ctrl+V to paste them into the Find What box, Word will
treat them correctly. Replace with the corresponding character in your base
font. Note that you can just type a straight apostrophe or quote mark; Word
will AutoFormat on insertion.

 

[Laura]

Hello,
I have the same problem, except none of the letters are not recognizable to
me; it's all in a strange font. What was once a one page document is not
spread out in a strange font over 65 pages. How can I fix this?

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

That doesn't sound like "the same problem."

 

[Laura]

By "the same problem" I meant that I am switching from Word 2007 to Word 2003.

 

[Terry Farrell]

If all your characters are garbage, it suggests that the documents have been
corrupted when moving them. Did you move them from an old PC to a new PC and
if so how?

Do you have any other error messages or symptoms?

 

[Tina]

I have an update to this problem.

If I have a WordPerfect document with double quotes, apostrophes, and
section marks, and use the Save As feature in WordPerfect to save it
as a Word 2003 document, the characters come across fine. There is no
need to do a search/replace. The convert software in WordPerfect seems
to work.

If I use Microsoft Word to open a WordPerfect document without
converting it first, then Microsoft Word does the conversion. This
causes the odd character substitutions (left double quote to uppercase
A and so on).

Odd, but repeatable. Hope that helps. Thanks for the help everyone!

Tina