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garbage characters in header, footer, and comments of Word documents

Here is my issue.

Client has boiler plate Word documents that are used over and over as starting point for similar reports.

These were created approximately 13 years and many office versions ago. Presumably as .doc.  Some 70 pages long and onerous to retype.

Document is passed from person to person in an office, with various personnel replacing boiler plate text with real text.  Adding comments to communicate with other reviewers.  At some point, very suddenly garbage appears in the headers, footers, and comments. (Some of the headers, footers, comments, not ALL). Some remain fine. Examples of bad ones below.

Comment text: 

B¦.¢'Á|ä÷‚Ãlu^]5@ømÌJ7ò»Ä{ 7/hRâEgJõßZy>W¯

Other comment boxes in the document are okay

Header

R2bêÝ¡ŠªÖ‹Å×oŽ‚$ôÚ«

should be precisely this

Engagement Overview

Footer:

¸Ì7þíÙh–"-ˆx«xµ*·Ûe“ç69

MGGsSöéš}ή϶kxÌÚLӎT’PbÐÐ'¹PM¶}XSÕ6ÓL6arâ¨%÷¥pRbèìû §I…%ᘛêguáSK¢7%cç‚~¹ÂãT`                                      É&bâix¸±ÉuO&ØwWsq

It should look like this format (info changed for privacy):

© Company XYZ, Inc.

A Member of the companies of company type Network

More details:

1. Documents are now .docx.   They START in 'compatibility mode'.  (Office 2007 mode).

2. Everyone in the office except one person has Office 2010.

3. Documents are password protected.

4. Documents sometimes seem to be converted to Office 2010 mode.

5. Once the 'garbage' appears, it is difficult to eradicate. Though it seems that sometimes if the person with Office 2007 opens it, all is fine, and they can PDF it even.  It doesn't appear that they can 'fix it' for others by opening it.

6. The documents often times have complex mathematical equations.

So, it would seem a boundry issue when crossing between 2007 and 2010.  The difficulty is, there is not a reproducible failure scenario where someone says "do X, Y, Z and the error occurs".   People work for a long time without it occurring sometimes, and at other times it happens fast.

It is hard for me to ask people to 'try this' or 'try that'.  I might want people to keep the document in compatibility mode throughout to see if it solves it.  I'd like to copy the content into a new Office 2010 mode file for the starting boiler plate, but don't know if that would do it.

I have Googled my head off looking for someone with a similar issue, but come up empty. What I'm hoping is, someone KNOWS what the issue, and has a definitive decree that "you can not do that", or "you must do this" to avoid the issue.

Thanks in advance for any ideas.

= = = = = = = =

Additional thought.

If we take the one precise translation:

Engagement Overview  displays as: R2bêÝ¡ŠªÖ‹Å×oŽ‚$ôÚ«

It seems to me the first 5 ASCII characters: 45:6e:67:61:67

turn into:  52 32 62 EA DD  (R2bêÝ)

Answer
Answer

In the interest of other having the problem, and to bring closure to this issue for now.  Doug Robbins (MVP) was kind enough to review my files, and I will post his reply here.

= = = = = = =  =

I have taken a look at the documents and can find nothing to really indicate what has caused the problem.

 

I did notice that the text to which the Heading 2 style should be applied, has instead been formatted with a Heading 2, Char Char, Char Char, Char

 

 

The issue of such Char Char styles, is dealt with in the Knowledge Base article 902064 at:

 

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/902064

 

As mentioned on that page, there is no workaround for existing documents that already have this issue. The hotfixes and service pack releases mentioned in the article only prevent the issue from occurring in new documents.

 

The article does state that it might be possible to create a macro solution to remove the unwanted styles, and I tried running a macro containing the following code, which is based on the information on fellow MVP Cindy Meisters website at: http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister/MyFavTip.htm#CharStyl

 

Dim styl As Style, doc As Document

Set doc = ActiveDocument

Set styl = doc.Styles.Add(Name:="Style1")

On Error Resume Next

doc.Styles("Heading 2,Char Char,Char, Char Char, Char").LinkStyle = styl

styl.Delete

 

However, it did not seem to make any difference to the definition of the style applied to the text (This was done on the original document without the corruption of the header and footer.

 

I also note that there are multiple variations of the Char Char styles as indicated when I tried to set such a style via the formatting option in the Find and Replace dialog

 

 

I am not even sure whether that has anything to do with your current problem.

 

As for future documents, if you are going to base them on the existing ones, then, as a minimum, I would install the “Save numbered versions add-in for Word 2007, 2010 and 2013” that you can download from the following page of fellow MVP Graham Mayor’s website:

 

http://www.gmayor.com/SaveVersionsAdd-In.htm

 

and have your staff use that to save documents (regularly) so that if a problem occurs, they will be able to go back to a version that did not have the problem.

 

Probably however, the best course of action would be to re-create the documents from scratch.  Unfortunately, “from scratch” means NO copying and pasting as that will only result in the Char Char styles surfacing again.

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Question Info

Last updated March 27, 2023 Views 2,922 Applies to: