replacing symbols in Word

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Sometimes when a document created in another application is opened up in Word, some of the information that Word doesn’t recognise is displayed as what I call hieroglyphics.
(you know lots of squares, y’s etc)

Does anyone know of a quick way to get rid of all the yuckies?

I’ve tried the replace function but can’t see anything in there that would be useful.

Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated

Thanks

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Hi, Sue. I don’t mean to be a rude , but you don’t mention what version of Word. However…

This typically happens when one converts from Word Perfect. If you use Word’s “What’s this?” key (shift+F1 turns your cursor into a question mark with an arrow) to point and click on the “heiroglyphics” you will probably see that they are in font “WP Typographic” (or some similar unusual font name). Then hit escape key to exit Word’s “What’s This” and copy the unusual character.

At that point, you can use the replace feature. Paste the offending mark into the Find what box (it probably will look like a different character), and then (if in Word 97 or above, click “More”) then click Format / Font and select the appropriate font.

In the Replace with, Click on Format / Style / Default Paragraph Font and key the appropriate character.

It sounds like a lot, but once you’ve done it a couple times, it makes sense and should work.

HTH. Good luck!

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Hi Karen

Thanks for your reply, apologies for not putting in the version of Word (I’m new at this), thought that mental telepathy might kick in.

Sue

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I have a similar problem when a document was created on a different machine. The symbols appear to be boxes or different symbols on the machine the document was not created on. My version is W97SR2, but I am not sure of the versions on the other machines. I think W97. I have tried embedding fonts in the file that created the document, but the symbols still appear different on the other machine.
In a different case, the symbols changed from a down pointing triangle to the greek symbol theta.

I am more concerned about the change from symbol to boxes. Specifically, the symbols installed were “less than” or “greater than” symbols but appear on the other machine as boxes.

Do you know what is going on and how to avoid/correct it? Remember that the person on the second machine will not know what the symbols are supposed to be.

Thanks

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I would suggest clicking on the character to find out what typeface it is and then making sure that font is loaded on your machine.

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I checked the fonts of the symbols in the document I created ; they show up as Arial. This is for a “less than” symbol. I am sure the receiving machine has Arial, but it came out as a box. Weird.

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Don’t know if this will help, but Word uses a box as a substitution for any character if considers non-printable. What your are seeing could be due to a difference in what character sets were used to create and display the document. If that is the case, search and replace is not going to work well, since some character sets have a lot of non-printable characters.

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Thanks for all the replies, I have resolved this by copying and pasting the symbols into the replace dialog box.

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