Paragraph marks unsearchable appear as boxes on PCs

[AIBS]

We are an all Mac office and often have to share word docs with PC users.
We've been running into a rather annoying problem where characters that look
like spaces on the Macs show up as boxes on PCs. On further inspection we
find that if we copy the offending text on the macs and then paste special as
Unformatted text, these characters appear as "^p" paragraph returns. However,
reveal formating does not display the symbol for this and of course the line
does not actually end. If I do a find for "^p" it finds the normal carraige
returns but does not find these phantom ones.

Does anyone know how these phantom "^p" marks are being created and how we
can get rid of them?

 

[AIBS]

Thanks for your help!

If I copy the character (looks like a space on Word 2004 for Mac) into the
find box (still in 2004 Mac Word) it displays as "^p" also if i copy the text
and paste special (still on the Mac) it shows up as a normal paragraph return.

 

[Elliott Roper]

OK. Let's see what that character is. Open Mac's character palette.
Select one of those pesky spaces. Click to the little gear icon on the
bottom left of the character palette window and select "show character
selected in application". Report back the character info from the
character palette e.g. Name: NO-BREAK SPACE Unicode: 00A0
and we'll see how to deal with it.

I don't think you are going to like what comes next. I think it might
involve a macro. I have just been experimenting with Word's special
characters and find and replace. It is not very good at all is it? Word
can't find its own en space for instance.
PAH!