Word 2003 - Styles Turn Text into Wingdings and Rectangles

D

Daisy

Word 2003 document originally created with either Word 97 or 2000. Has
170 pages and 23 sections. Wait, it gets better!

Some sections are portrait orientation, some are landscape. Some
sections contain tables. There are lots of headers and footers. Some
of the headers contain tables. There are over 100 styles, maybe 200.
User was editing the doc today and the font in several of the
paragraphs turned into rectangles. She was able to turn them into
wingdings by applying a different style (because the style had turned
into wingdings). Eventually, more and more of the text turned into
rectangles and she eventually couldn't even get that to change to
wingdings.

I tried various methods of fixing the corruption, to no avail. I tried
the Open and Repair feature - didn't work. Tried saving as .rtf -
didn't work. Tried saving as html and back to doc -this fixed some of
the corruption but not all. Copied all but the last paragraph mark and
pasted into new document - didn't work because the corruption is
probably contained in a different paragraph mark in a different
section (and probably more than one section). Haven't tried copying
and pasting each section separately into a new document (without the
last paragraph mark) but I guess I could try.

I'm looking at the text in one of the section headers now and it's
turned into wingdings. The font says Wingdings 3. Style is "Page
Number." It's supposed to say the page number and document name, but
instead it just shows wingdings. I selected a different style and now
the wingdings have become rectangles, although the font now says Times
New Roman. When I click on the Style drop-down list, some of the
styles look fine, but others have wingdings next to them. I then typed
some new text into the document and selected a style from the drop-
down list. It formatted the text correctly. I then applied another
style and now the text is wingdings. I applied the original style and
now the text is back to normal. But the text that has already turned
to rectangles cannot be changed back to a regular font. Some of the
styles look fine and others have wingdings, so I assume they are
corrupt.

Is the situation hopeless? I'm not an expert on styles and I didn't
create this document so I don't know how the styles got created.
 

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