Strange 'hard break' in Word document

J

Jim Wood

Well, here's something I've never seen before, and it had me really in fits
until I was able to byhpass it.

I had this instruction manual I had written, about 50 pages with maybe 4 or
5 section breaks. I needed to create a similar, new manual, so I did a Save
As with a new name and started making changes.

Much of the 'boilerplate' in the new manual was identical to the old one.
But when I got into the meat of the text, I had to delete a large portion of
the original. No problem, I simply highlighted a bunch and stabbed the
Delete button.

Well, when I went in to insert some new text, I ran across a very strange
thing. I'm set up to show all formatting marks (except for those stupid dots
for spaces), and one mark on one page was a paragraph mark ¶ that would not
delete. This is just like the one you fined at the very end of most Word
documents, but it was smack-dab between two normal-looking paragraphs.
What's more, it made the page break in odd places, depending on what I typed
into that 'strange' paragraph.

To make a very long story short, I was able to copy and paste much of the
document into a blank one (avoiding that ¶ mark) and thus salvaged my work.
But that odd ¶ mark really had me going. It's as though the document was
really two .doc files strung together. Pagination was coherent, no breaks or
numbers starting over, and there was no section break showing at that point.
So, anyone know what the heck that could have been?
 
J

Jim Wood

Gents:

Thanks for the responses to my question. Good to know that a paragraph can
become 'corrupt.' Not sure if the paragraph mark was nominally 'hidden
text,' and it's gone now so I suppose we'll never know. It's fortunate that
Word and other Windows products have the advantage of cutting-and-pasting so
that, if need be, the entire 'good part' of a document can be lifted out and
saved. I recall the very early days of word processing where a bug could
wipe out an enire week's work. All's well that ends well, I guess.

Jim
 

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