Strange formatting (Word 2003)

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1) You cannot find section breaks in the headers or footers. They “live” in the body of the document, and that’s where you have to search for them.
A good way to see them is to switch to Normal view and to turn on the display of non-printing characters using the Show/Hide

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Have you used “Open and Repair” to see if Word could find anything amiss?

I have also experienced similar things with section- and page-breaks, only to find that they were either formatted as “hidden” or were squirreled away as a Tracked Change. The former was easy to see after selecting “Show All” (Ctrl+Shift+8), and the latter by selecting the appropriate display from the Reviewing toolbar.

Sorry if I’m preaching to the choir.

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Hans, I consistently work with the “show….” on. Got used to it on older systems years ago and I like being able to see what I

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I assumed that by “open and repair” you meant “recover text from any file”. I tried that, and lo and behold… ALL the weird formatting was magically taken away. I’ll definitely save that little trick for future use!

Sadly, the track changes showed me nothing I didn’t already know. But a good idea anyway.

Oh well, I guess I will chalk this one up to a mystery and move on. Thanks for the help and comments.

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“Open and Repair” is quite different from “Recover text from any file”.

“Open and Repair” is an option in the Open button of the File | Open dialog; This button has a little dropdown arrow on the right hand side. If you click this dropdown arrow, a list of options is displayed, and “Open and Repair” is one of them. This option opens the file as a Word document, checks if the (invisible) meta-information that defines the layout and formatting of the document is intact, and tries to repair any damage to the meta-information.

“Recover text from any file” can be used on any kind of file that contains bits and pieces of readable text, not just Word documents. This option, available in the “Files of Type” dropdown list at the bottom of the File | Open dialog, strips everything from the file that is not readable text. One of its uses is to salvage text from a damaged Word document. But because of the way it works, all formatting information will be lost – all text you recover will be in the same font, etc.

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