funny square in all new docs

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JB - 22 May 2008 21:37 GMT

Hi all.
weird thing in my colleagues' office. when they open a new doc, there is a
little square (hollow box) on the right of the cursor and it moves along but
it won't delete. Well I managed to delete it by going to print preview and
then back to normal view but it only worked a couple of times and crashed.
but in any case, how ever many times you open a new doc, it's there.
it started with one of the workstations in the department and now is on 3 of
them on a network in a school but no one else has the same problem. I was
wondering if it had something to do with the 'normal' template.
Any ideas?
J

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JB - 22 May 2008 21:42 GMT

Forgot to say, Word 2003, and Windows XP

> Hi all.
> weird thing in my colleagues' office. when they open a new doc, there is a
[quoted text clipped - 8 lines]
> Any ideas?
> J

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Cindy M. - 23 May 2008 10:23 GMT

Hi Jb,

> weird thing in my colleagues' office. when they open a new doc, there is a
> little square (hollow box) on the right of the cursor and it moves along but
[quoted text clipped - 4 lines]
> them on a network in a school but no one else has the same problem. I was
> wondering if it had something to do with the 'normal' template.

It would have been better to post this in a non-programming newsgroup, as it's
not a programming question. More a configuration issue...

The problem could be in Normal.dot, or it could be caused by some kind of Add-
in running on the system. The square box is usually a sign that an unknown,
non-printable character has been inserted into the document structure. Most
often, I see what you describe if I open or copy/paste in text that was
generated by another application.

If you hold down CTRL when you start Word, do you still see the square box?

How about if you rename Normal.dot to Normal.OLD, then start Word?

And if you both rename and hold down CTRl when starting?

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 17 2005)
http://www.word.mvps.org

This reply is posted in the Newsgroup; please post any follow question or reply
in the newsgroup and not by e-mail :-)

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Sam Hobbs - 23 May 2008 18:27 GMT

Can copy the mystery character into the clipboard? Then paste it into a VBA
macro that uses the Asc function to show the ASCII number for the character.
That give a clue at least.

> Hi all.
> weird thing in my colleagues' office. when they open a new doc, there is a
[quoted text clipped - 8 lines]
> Any ideas?
> J

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Jean-Guy Marcil - 23 May 2008 19:30 GMT

> Can copy the mystery character into the clipboard? Then paste it into a VBA
> macro that uses the Asc function to show the ASCII number for the character.
> That give a clue at least.

No need to copy/paste... just select the box, and run this macro:

MsgBox AscW(Selection.Range.Text)

My feeling is that it is a paragraph mark from a font that has not defined
the pilcrow...

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