Lost formatting in document

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I have a user who has a 26 page long Word 97 document with nice paragraph numbering, formatting, tables, headers and footers and sections separating the document between landscape and portrait.

The problem is, when it is viewed on a PC elsewhere in the country, the formatting is lost and the content is spread over a different number of pages.

At first we suspected Outlook to be the culprit, mangling the document in transit, but when we checked by saving it to floppy disc for transfer, the same thing happened.

I have asked her to compare the settings under Tools, Options and check things like margins and so on are identical, which they are. I have verified that both PCs are running Windows NT4 and Office 97 SR2.

To further complicate matters, I just tried Edit, Select All, Copy then pasted it into a new document and noticed the formatting stays, but the first couple of lines of page 2 now appear at the bottom of page 1 in the new document.

If anyone has any ideas what could be causing this behaviour I would be most grateful.

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Hi Ensleigh_IT,

First thing to check is to see if the document is being opened as “Recover text from any file”.

Have them look in File/Open and see if the Files of Type at the bottom reflects Word Documents.
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Cheers!

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Thanks BAM,

Good suggestion, but unfortunately not the case. The document is definitely being opened as a Word document, not recovered text.

I’ve opened it myself and the copy/paste all into new document behaviour is baffling.

Alison

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>To further complicate matters, I just tried Edit, Select All, Copy then pasted it into a new document and noticed the formatting stays, but the first couple of lines of page 2 now appear at the bottom of page 1 in the new document.

[grasping at straws]

Maybe check the settings for these few paragraphs, one by one, as in Format, Paragraph, LineAndpageBreaks, keep With next, Page break before and so on.

Could it be that these settings have been made locally, and the settings in the applied paragraph style are coming into conflict with them?

[/grasping at straws]

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One more straw to grasp, what about printer settings/drivers and font availability. Word could possibly show the name of a font but, if not installed, do some substituting which might throw things.

Andrew C

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Hi Alison,

Do you get the same result if you create a new document and use Insert/File and insert the contents?

This method omits the last paragraph mark. If the document is corrupt, frequently the corruption is held in the last paragraph mark.
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Cheers!

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hi, BAM –

Does this hold true under all circumstances? If I suspect a corrupt file, I no longer have to copy the whole document EXCEPT for the last para mark, but rather just File/Insert??

Great to know- and how do you get to know such arcanum??

Best, ACM

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Hi ACM,

Document corruption is typically stored in a Section Break. So in a single-section document the corruption tends to be stored in the final paragraph mark, that includes a hidden Section Break.

When you use File/Insert the hidden section break is omitted which is essentially the same as copying/pasting everything except the last paragraph mark.

BAM edit:
**Correction to last paragraph: should be Insert/File**
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Cheers!

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Hi, BAM. Er, umm… to clarify for newbies, it would be Insert / File . Just as an aside, I have also seen it work on multi-section documents… but that could be because the types of documents I trouble-shoot have multiple numbering schemes and other various nasties which cause Word to belch in that final all-important section.

Cheers!

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Hi Karen,

Whoops! A little dyslexia happening there! Thanks for catching it.
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Cheers!

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This may or may not be at play in this case, but we ran into something interesting the other day copying and pasting text into a new document. The document was created using Word’s Heading styles to apply paragraph numbering. When I copied and pasted it into a new document on my computer, the Heading style formatting changed completely. When another person did the same thing on her computer, the Heading styles retained the correct formatting.
When you copy text which has been formatted using a style into another document, one of two things is supposed to happen. If the target document shows the style which has been used in the source document as being in use, the text will pick up the formatting of the target document’s styles. If the target document does not show the style used as being in use, the style formatting will travel with the document and not change.
What we found the other day is that if someone has modified his default styles, those modified styles show up as being in use in a brand new document. I have changed the default formatting on all my heading styles, so when I copied and pasted the document into a new document, my personal default heading styles were applied to the text. The other person who did this has not changed her default styles, so only normal and default paragraph font were showing as being in use in a new document on her computer, and the style formatting stayed the same.
By the way, when you insert a document into a new Word document, your default styles, changed or not, are applied to the document. We insert documents all the time because of conversion cleanup problems, and the normal style (which is usually all that’s applied) always changes unless it exactly matches in both documents.

Lee Morgan

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When you say the formatting is lost, I’m assuming you don’t mean ALL the formatting. As was mentioned, different printer drivers make a big difference, particularly in the number of lines that will fit on a page. And as another poster mentioned, if there’s a font in use that’s not on the other computers, the substitution can make a terrible mess. And if there’s anything in the document that depends on the template, and the template is not available in the location where the document is looking for it, that will affect it as well.

When we’re posting documents to be viewed by others, if formatting is important, we convert them to Acrobat pdf so that the exact formatting will be retained.

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Just a thought

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Are the styles updated from the template when the file is opened? This is an insidious tick box in the Templates and Addins dialog. The remote PC’s template may have different style definitions to yours.

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I have received so much good advice, it

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