Symbol field becomes corrupt in word

[EKH]

Has anyone seen this behavior?

When User has opened one of our firm documents on his home pc, the bullet
symbol fields break { SYMBOL \f Symbol 439 \* MERGEFORMAT}. The field code
bracket gets replaced by a box. The document was originally Word 97. The
user has a later version of Word.

In addition to this, tables that contained this field convert to text.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Is this document perhaps being opened using the "Recover Text from Any File"
setting in the Open dialog?

 

[Klaus Linke]

Two other possibilities:
-- The user doesn't have the Symbol font on his home machine, or not the
same version.
Unlikely, but possible, say if he uses MacWord.
-- If he can't even see the field codes any more (Alt+F9), that might happen
if the document was saved as RTF.
That would change symbol fields to real inserted symbols, and that change
sometimes seems not to work well.

Regards,
Klaus