Strange problem with Word

[DeanL]

Hi everyone,

I have an interesting problem with some word documents that is
baffling everyone I seem to speak to and wanted to "put it out there"
to see if anyone can help.

We have both Word 2003 and Word 2007 installed across our organization
(obviously, very few have both on their PC's). We have seen a small
number of examples where a document created in Word 2003 will reopen
correctly in Word 2003 but when the same document reopened in Word
2007 it appears to have everything duplicated almost exactly so you
end up with double the pages. I say almost exactly because in a few
instances, there does appear to be a couple of words or lines missing
but it's not consistent across different documents.

I've checked whether this is due to track changes but it doesn't
appear to be because without fail, if I open the document in 2003 I
cannot get the duplicate information to appear and if I open the SAME
document in 2007 then I can't get it to disappear.

The simple answer is to just delete the duplicate information but I
need to find out why this is happening in case something does slip
under the radar and get past our pretty stringent accessibility
standards.

Any information you have would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Cindy M.]

Hi DeanL,

I've checked whether this is due to track changes but it doesn't
appear to be because without fail, if I open the document in 2003 I
cannot get the duplicate information to appear and if I open the SAME
document in 2007 then I can't get it to disappear.

Mmmm. The other thing it could be is a cross-reference to something
(often a heading) for which the bookmark has extended to include more
text than was originally intended. Does Alt+F9, to reveal field codes,
show anything interesting?

The other trouble-shooting step I'd take would be to save this file in
Word 2003 XML (instead of doc) file format.

1. See if that opens any differently on the 2007 machines

2. If it does, inspect the XML to see if it turns up any anomalies.

FWIW, if documents are damaged the version that created them can often
open them without problems. In a newer version, odd things may crop up
that a background converter doesn't know how to handle. I'm guessing
that this is the problem, here. Do all these files originate from the
same template, perhaps? Or come from the same user/machine? Or are
produced by the same applet (reporting app, for example)?

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 17 2005)
http://www.word.mvps.org

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