Red Paragraph Marks (Office 2000)

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My brother sent me a Word document and I’ve opened it in Word 2000. I don’t know which version of Word he is using. When I make the paragraph marks visible I see that some of them are red! I haven’t discovered anything special or different about those paragraphs. Are red paragraph marks supposed to tell me something?

Thanks,
Bill

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It could mean that Track Changes has been on at some time during the lifetime of the document. Try Tools | Track Changes | Accept or Reject Changes…, and accept all changes in the document. If the paragraph marks return to normal, the red color was indeed due to tracked changes.

It is, of course, also possible to color the paragraph marks manually. I wouldn’t know why, but people do stranger things than that…

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Thanks Hans, I didn’t think about the possible connection to track changes. I tried to do the Accept Changes thing but it won’t let you do that unless you find some changes to accept and it couldn’t find any. I’ve asked my brother about the red paragraph marks too but I haven’t heard from him yet.

Bill

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If Word tells you that there are no changes to accept/reject, that possibility is ruled out. Manual tinkering seems the most probable remaining explanation…

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Does he use any thirdparty add-ins? In my office we use the Payne Tools that will turn the pargaraph marker red/hidden when it inserts a “style separator”.

Or at some point, an editor may have turned the entire paragraph red to highlight it, but neglected to select the entire paragraph when turning it back to black.

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Hans,

You are right! I finally heard from my brother and he says that when he first began to put this document together he marked missing information areas in red and then replaced them with black when he received the final info. So, apparently the paragraph marks remained red. He doesn’t even know about paragraph marks so he wouldn’t have had any idea if he was including the paragraph mark when replaced some text.

Thanks,
Bill

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OK, I’m glad the mystery is cleared up.

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