Publisher 2003 is not displaying wordart or dawing characters,

[towtruck]

I cannot get wordart or lines, rectangles, to be visible on screen, although
they print fine. Whenever I go to edit the wordart no colour is displayed and
I cannot get it to change colour and save it. Also when choosing wordart, it
does not give the option to draw the position on the document. usually you
create a word art box and stretch it to fit the space, but in my latest
publisher office 2003, I have checked all the menu options in view etc

 

[Ed Bennett]

I cannot get wordart or lines, rectangles, to be visible on screen,
although they print fine. Whenever I go to edit the wordart no colour
is displayed and I cannot get it to change colour and save it. Also
when choosing wordart, it does not give the option to draw the
position on the document. usually you create a word art box and
stretch it to fit the space, but in my latest publisher office 2003,

Check View > Pictures. If that fails...

This is almost certainly a problem with your video driver.

By going to Display Properties > Settings > Advanced > Troubleshoot, and
dragging the Hardware Acceleration slider down three notches, you will be
able to disable Publisher from making the calls on the video driver that
cause this problem.

If this does fix your problem, it means that the problem does indeed lie
with the video driver. You can leave your computer running at this lower
hardware acceleration, but it may cause problems with other programs. It is
a better solution to try and find a driver update for your graphics card.
Normally, the latest drivers from the video card manufacturer will do the
trick, but ATI (and recently Intel and Dell) tend to be slower in perfecting
their drivers, so some newer ATI and Intel cards to not yet have drivers
available that do not exhibit this behaviour. The solution here is to nag
ATI/Intel/Dell for better drivers.

(Please note that even if your computer is brand new, you won't necessarily
have the latest drivers)