Weird symbols replace quotation marks, apostrophes, etc

[KitKat]

I have Office #10 for Mac 2001. I've had no problems with it until recently
when I noticed that after I had typed a document, closed it, then reopened
it, strange symbols had replaced quotation marks, apostrophes, and at the end
of the document would be a long list of words such as: Normal, Default
Paragraph Font, Symbol, Heading 1, Body Text, Data Auto Recovery, etc.

At first it seemed that it was just recent documents that had been affected;
then I opened older documents and noted the same problems. I'd prefer fixing
this problem without upgrading to a 2008. If it can't be fixed, is there any
guarantee that I'd be able to save the existing documents in the 2008 version
and have them be normal?

 

[CyberTaz]

Hello KitKat -

It sounds like you may have a corrupted Normal template. It should be easy
enough to address but it depends to some extent on version abut which your
information is a bit confusing.

Office for Mac version 10.x was marketed as Office X, but you refer also to
2001 which is version 9.x, the latter being for "Classic" Max OS. Version
10, however, runs on OS X only.

Use the appropriate Troubleshooting link on the top left of this page as it
pertains to your version of the software & OS:

http://word.mvps.org/Mac/TroubleshootWord2001.html

HTH |:>)
Bob Jones
[MVP] Office:Mac

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

I had a different guess from Bob.....

It's been a while since I used Word 2001--or X? your statement is
unclear--but:

Go to File | Open, look at the dropdown for Format/Type or something. I
suspect that it is set to "Recover Text from Any File". This is a handy
technique for corrupted or non-Word files, but tends to mess up the
formatting for real Word files. Change the dropdown to Word format.

If you opened a file this way, and re-saved it, then I think it might be
messed up for good. But if you didn't save any of these weird-looking
documents, then once you change the Format dropdown, I think they should
re-open okay.

more detail:
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/AppErrors/RecoverText.htm