Hi Emila

When you say webdings are you referring to a font? If you are referring to
a font, verify the font exists and displays correctly on your new system by
going into your control panel, fonts, and double clicking on the font name
and looking at the preview. If the preview looks bad then the font is bad
and needs to be removed and reinstalled from Windows.

If the font looks good, I would use the following steps in Word to clear
the direct formatting on the text:
- First select the text that is displaying incorrectly
- Hold down the Crtl key and press the spacebar key, then let go of these
keys
- Then hold down the Crtl key and press the Q key, then let go of these
keys.
This will clear the font and paragraph formatting and reset it back to the
style that is applied to the text.

At this point, if you still see squares, I would save the file as RTF (Rich
Text Format) then close the file, reopen the RTF file you just saved,
resave the file as a Word DOC document file and see if that clears up the
problem

If that doesn't work you can try the "Recover Text from any file" option in
Word's File Open dialog box. You can see this option in the drop down menu
in the File Open "Files of Type" box under the area where the file name is
entered. This will open the file with just the text and should use your
default font.

Here is a KB article that may help as well (I'm not sure it your running
Word 2000 or Word XP):
211634 WD2000: Troubleshooting Damaged Documents
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=211634

290932 WD2002: Troubleshooting Damaged Documents
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=290932

212274 HOW TO: Recover Text from Any File in Microsoft Word 2000
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=212274

290946 WD2002: How to Recover Text from Any File
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=290946

I hope this information helps resolve the issue.

DK Pfeiffer
Microsoft Technical Support for Business Applications

Hi Emila,

The original document may have used a decorative/symbol
font (i.e. characters that look like letters but that
are only seen by Word as the equivalent of graphics.

The font used in the original document, not what is
presently being used by Word is what is displayed in
the font drop down on the the formatting toolbar.

With the document open, if you check in Word's
Tools=>Options=>Compatability=>[Font Substitutions]
you may, if you have the original version of the
file see the font that Word can't find.  If you install
that font then, as D.L. mentioned, the document may
'correct' itself.

If not, and it was a decorative font then Word or
you applying a 'normal' (text) font, such as Times New, Roman
over the characters can result in the hollow squares.

You may need to use the steps in this file in that
case.
 http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;290978

=========
ok...this prolly sounds really really stupid, but......I
have a file which i always keep passworded and saved in
webdings, i created this file originally in word 97 (i
think).  however, ive only recently upgraded to a newer
office package and tried to access the file.  It comes up
and asks for the password which i give it, then it
displays the document the way it was saved, only it doesnt
recognise the font.  so i try changing the font to say
times new roman (or any other readable font) and all it
displays are lots of little boxes. even when i try to
change it to the webdings option it only displays a few
symbols and doesnt resemble how it looks when i open it.
anyone got any ideas how i can get to the actual text?

emilia<<