Word inserts wierd characters

[Jody]

My wife is so frustrated with Word for OS X that she is refusing to
use it. We must have some setting turned on that we don't know how to
turn off. We are running 10.2x and I have installed the Office X
updates thru 10.1.5. I have not tried reinstalling the Office
software. What happens is this: All colons become the Spanish n with
the squiggle above it and apostrophes become the letter i.
Additionally, at the end of the documents there is a long list of what
looks like formatting information such as 32 lines, many repeated
twice or four times, such as:
Normal
Normal
Default Paragraph Font
Default Paragraph Font

Microsoft Word 10.1
Root Entry

So on and so forth thru:

Comp Obj
Comp Obj
ObjectPool
ObjectPool
Microsoft Word DocumentWord.Document.8

Any ideas what to do or where I can go for help?

Thanks,
Jody McCann
(e-mail address removed)
(e-mail address removed)

 

[Dayo Mitchell]

Assuming you are opening already created documents to find this problem,
sounds like you have the File | Open dialog set to Recover Text from Any
File.

See if changing it helps--or if these changes happen dynamically as you
type, post back.

Dayo