Vicious demon at work ?

[incognito]

I was working on a simple list of headings for some project and was almost
done when I must have hit a combination of keys that started to get Word
(MacOffice X) going wild by automatically inserting commas (,,,,,,,,,,,,,)
ad infinitum. I could delete portions of the perpetual string but it seemed
that I could not save what I had done so far because the running string of
commas was being entered as a filename all by itself and quickly was too
long to be accepted (31characters max). Somehow I was able to save it as a
text file with name ,,,,,,,,,,,,.txt after which I closed Word. Whenever I
opened Word again the diabolical string of commas reappeared. The demon was
even able to intonate rapid sounds after I shut down Word again. I had no
idea what program created the sounds. I finally shut down my Powerbook G4
(OSX Tiger 10.4.3). After a restart all was calm again and peaceful.
A late Halloween trick? Who has a hint? And how could I have stopped it
without destroying my work?

PS: I was able to salvage my work by reformatting the text file.

 

[incognito]

Unfortunately, that is not the case!

While working on another document this morning it did the same with another
key combination involving the strike-out that is put on a deleted word by
the track-changes feature. The program started to put the strike-out
(including the color changes) across the whole paragraph and beyond. Weird!
I closed word immediately without saving any changes and am stupefied as to
what to do next.
Should I re-install Word? This is getting serious and annoying as I don¹t
dare to do anything with Word.


Beth Rosengard wrote on 11/3/05 3:10 AM

 

[Elliott Roper]

Unfortunately, that is not the case! (jammed key)

While working on another document this morning it did the same with another
key combination involving the strike-out that is put on a deleted word by
the track-changes feature. The program started to put the strike-out
(including the color changes) across the whole paragraph and beyond. Weird!
I closed word immediately without saving any changes and am stupefied as to
what to do next.
Should I re-install Word? This is getting serious and annoying as I don¹t
dare to do anything with Word.

That looks like a fun bug to track down. Try working for while with key
repeat switched off via system preferences. That's to explore the idea
that Word has over-generously misinterpreted a repeated key.

Also, see if you can reproduce the behaviour in another application.
I'm with Beth here, it is likely to be something outside Word.

Oh, wait! One more thing to try. Do you have any fiendish macros
associated with your document? Check in tools->macros->macros... for a
list of suspects.