Unusual Word Recovery Problem

[Jessiepops]

I was working on formatting a particular document, when Word said it had to
close, but that it would recover my document as best it could. I had to say
yes, and when I looked at the recovered document, I was pleased to see that
most of my changes were there. However, from about halfway through the
document, the text has what LOOKS like grey shading all through it. It is
not, however, grey shading. It does not appear to be any kind of formatting
that I can change. I have tried revealing the formatting, Format/Font,
Format/Shading, Format/Background even! It honestly doesn't appear to be
recognising this as formatting. So I had a friend open it on his computer.
It's exactly the same there. So I tried copying the text from one document to
another (new) document - same thing. When I right click over it, it doesn't
come up as the regular right click menu, but has options such as "Show
picture toolbar". I've never seen or heard of this before - has anyone else?

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Sounds like a large portion of your document is a field (perhaps
IncludeText?).

I was working on formatting a particular document, when Word said it had to
close, but that it would recover my document as best it could. I had to say
yes, and when I looked at the recovered document, I was pleased to see that
most of my changes were there. However, from about halfway through the
document, the text has what LOOKS like grey shading all through it. It is
not, however, grey shading. It does not appear to be any kind of formatting
that I can change. I have tried revealing the formatting, Format/Font,
Format/Shading, Format/Background even! It honestly doesn't appear to be
recognising this as formatting. So I had a friend open it on his computer.
It's exactly the same there. So I tried copying the text from one document to
another (new) document - same thing. When I right click over it, it doesn't
come up as the regular right click menu, but has options such as "Show
picture toolbar". I've never seen or heard of this before - has anyone

else?

 

[Jessiepops]

Suzanne, I LOVE YOU!

I'm so pleased that you figured this out - it never even occured to me that
it would be a field. THANK YOU SO MUCH!

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I'm not sure I understand how that helps, but I'm glad I could help! <g>

 

[Jessiepops]

It helps greatly, because it turns out that Word was indeed reading that
whole section as a field. I did Alt+F9 to see the code (just to see if it
even was a field), and codes came up all over the place. Apparently the guy
who put the document together originally had copied a ton of pictures from
the internet into it. For whatever reason, when he pasted them into the
document directly, they retained the link to the address he found them at. So
I'm now going through, saving the pictures individually, as their own files,
and I've managed to save my text and it all looks wonderful again. It's also
good to know that it was something relatively easy to fix. Now WHY Word would
'recover' it like that, I have no clue, but I'm glad it wasn't anything
majorly serious!

Thanks again for thinking of that - you've saved me so much frustration!

Jess

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Many people don't realize that when they paste pictures from the Internet,
they are just pasting a link to the server location of the graphic file.
Unless you either (a) save the picture to your HD (by right-clicking on the
picture on the Web page and choosing Save Picture As) and then use Insert |
Picture to put it in your document or (b) immediately press Ctrl+Shift+F9 to
unlink the field and embed the picture in your document, all you have is a
link that won't work unless you have an Internet connection (and may be
pretty slow to display even then). Recent versions of Office or Internet
Explorer (or security updates to Office or Windows) have made it much more
difficult to paste text and graphics from the Web, further frustrating users
but perhaps at least leading some of them to insert Web graphics correctly.