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Text already in document on opening Word.


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Whilst this is nothing to do with France I know there are one or two folk out there who know about these things.

Can anybody comment on this weird fault? A friend of ours has a problem every time she opens Word 2000. Instead of a blank page part of a letter she wrote some time ago appears on the screen. Now she can delete this text but when she closes this file and opens Word again there it is. We have looked for this text everywhere and it cannot be found. The original letter has been deleted. Looking in the Word Startup folder under File Locations shows nothing. Macros show nothing and Headers and Footers show nothing. Templates and Add-ins again nothing so any suggestions I can pass on would be very welcome…….Thanks on her behalf………J 

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The normal.dot (=plain template in Word) has been overwritten.

Solution:

WITHOUT Word running, do a search for a file (or files) called "normal.dot".

You can either rename them (to be safe), perhaps to "suspect.dot".

Word will automatically re-create the normal.dot default Template next time you run it.

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The normal.dot template can be overwritten without the user being aware of it via one of a suite of template bugs that have been in Word since at least v.6. They're so deeply embedded now that it's impossible for MS to do anything about it, short of re-write the Word code from scratch. I came across this when trying to use Master and Subdocument at Railtrack - Microsoft sent an expert to work through the issues with me. We finally convinced the management that the bugs were in the program and not my head.

The only thing to do is to create a new normal.dot, as Clair recommended.

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Thanks to both and I have passed this gen on to the person concerned, will notify on the outcome......Cheers..... J

 

All now OK your suggestion worked so our friend has asked me to thank you both for your information, many thanks indeed........J

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There's another nice 'feature' with Word (and Publisher).  If you open the document in Wordpad or Notepad instead of Word you will get a lot of unprintable charaters but near the top you will also see edits which were made in the document.  This is stored here for the very good reason that you may want to 'Undo Edit', fine.  The downside is that if you have had a bit of a rant and typed things like 'so-and-so is an unreasonble ugly SOB' or worse, then think better and delete it, it is still held in the file for all to see!  They way round this is to cut 'n paste to a new doc before sending the file.
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I didn't know that Pierre.

I tried it out just now, but it doesn't seem to work for me.  Surely if the Word document is saved and closed it is no longer possible to edit-undo, so would not need to retain the information?

I even tried it using the track changes option in Word, but still could not see my deleted or altered stuff in Notepad.

Did I do something wrong?

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[quote user="Pierre ZFP"]There's another nice 'feature' with Word (and Publisher).  If you open the document in Wordpad or Notepad instead of Word you will get a lot of unprintable charaters but near the top you will also see edits which were made in the document.  This is stored here for the very good reason that you may want to 'Undo Edit', fine.  The downside is that if you have had a bit of a rant and typed things like 'so-and-so is an unreasonble ugly SOB' or worse, then think better and delete it, it is still held in the file for all to see!  They way round this is to cut 'n paste to a new doc before sending the file.[/quote]

That is very useful to know. I knew all the stuff about normal.dot but I certainly didn't think of the edited text being retained in the document. I should have realised because of Word's "Track Changes" feature.

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[quote user="Cat"]

I didn't know that Pierre.

I tried it out just now, but it doesn't seem to work for me.  Surely if the Word document is saved and closed it is no longer possible to edit-undo, so would not need to retain the information?

I even tried it using the track changes option in Word, but still could not see my deleted or altered stuff in Notepad.

Did I do something wrong?

[/quote]

Cat

I too have done some experiments and can't always duplicate it. Notepad seems better for testing this out as it displays all text in a document. Wordpad is related to Word so my also hide this problem to a certain extent.

Edit: It may have something to do with the track changes feature as well.

I am using Word 2000 with Win2kpro.

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[quote user="Pierre ZFP"]Well, appologies to all, it seems that the text is not retained.  It certainly used to be and I even remember a politician being caught out by it once.  The 'feature' must have been fixed.  Once again, sorry to cause alarm without checking my facts.[/quote]

I have been able to simulate your original discovery by switching on Track Changes and using the Tools, Track Changes, Highlight Changes. Therefore anyone using word in this mode would be unaware that there is an audit trail of their work.

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