Word 2003 document changes when saving to the network

A

Ali

I have had this strange issue that seemed to go away for a little while,
however it has popped up again. When a person makes a change to a MS Word
2003 document and saves the document down to network storage (windows 2000
server). Later on if that same person or someone else for that matter opens
the same document it has changed. It may contain additional spaces between
paragraphs, date may change, signatures may dissappear, etc. If two people
open the same document - it may look different on two PC's.

I thought it might be something to do with codes because in each case the
document came from something else. In the current situation the text was
copied and pasted from a PDF file and info may have been added with Mail
Merge. In earlier cases the document originated from Office XP and was
converted or saved in Office 2003.

The users get very frustrated. I do not believe this has anything to do with
my server, which is functioning normally. I also do not believe there are any
viruses on the machine which would cause erratic behavior.

Your assistance is appreciated. Thanks.
 
K

Keme

Ali said:
I have had this strange issue that seemed to go away for a little while,
however it has popped up again. When a person makes a change to a MS Word
2003 document and saves the document down to network storage (windows 2000
server). Later on if that same person or someone else for that matter opens
the same document it has changed. It may contain additional spaces between
paragraphs, date may change, signatures may dissappear, etc. If two people
open the same document - it may look different on two PC's.

I thought it might be something to do with codes because in each case the
document came from something else. In the current situation the text was
copied and pasted from a PDF file and info may have been added with Mail
Merge. In earlier cases the document originated from Office XP and was
converted or saved in Office 2003.

The users get very frustrated. I do not believe this has anything to do with
my server, which is functioning normally. I also do not believe there are any
viruses on the machine which would cause erratic behavior.

Your assistance is appreciated. Thanks.
Click to expand...

Formatting text copied from other documents may display erratic
behavior, but should be identical from time to time on the same
computer. Some ideas:

Date and signature changes:
Maybe auto updated date and signature fields. Are time and date settings
on the server and client computers consistent?

Formatting changes:
Did you check to see if there are paragraph marks added, or if it's just
the distance between paragraphs that change? Inserted paragraph marks
means there is probably some kind of alien activity.

Format settings from the default template (normal.dot) can sometimes
propagate to the document. Not sure if that happens more than once
though. If the users have personalized "normal.dot" templates, that can
account for the differences in formatting.

Printers sometime have different capabilities. If your users have
different default printers, formatting can change to reflect printer
limitations.
 
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