Strange characters appear in Word XP tables

[Karla3764]

Little boxes appear in an XP document in the tables. Looks like some sort of font character issue, but I can't seem to fix it. See sample attached.

[vonpookie]

I'm not seeing anything, so I'm going to assume you've simply managed to turn on the 'show formatting marks'.

On your toolbars, do you have an icon that looks like a backwards 'P' (aka, the paragraph mark). If you do, click that and see if the strange squares go away.

Otherwise, go to Tools\Format\View tab and uncheck any box under the heading "formatting marks" that has a check in the box.

[Redbeard]

Many people like to work with the backwards P icon (actually the Show/Hide icon) set to hide things such as spaces, tabs and other items. This is fine- until you get into trouble and can't figure out why a document is displaying the way it is. The only way to be sure is to click on the paragraph symbol (actually called a pilcrow- trivia answer) and see those items. You can adjust what is shown by going to Tools/Options and selecting items in the View tab.

[Karla3764]

Thanks for the replies.. actully my paragraph icon is off. So that isn't the problem. Looks like this document is pulling some strange font characters that the document does not know how to interpret. Any other ideas how to get rid of them?

Thanks,

[vonpookie]

Frankly, that's the only problem I think there is. There is absolutely nothing strange showing up in your file for me.

I did just notice something, though. If you have selected "show paragraph marks" from the View menu, the toolbar button with the paragraph icon doesn't appear to recognize that and will still consider the markings as "off."

At least, it is in my copy of 2002. Go to the View menu and see if you have a checkmark next to "show paragraph marks." If there is, turn it off and see if the weird symbols go away.

Or, just click the toolbar button until they go away.

[Deb G.]

I can see the small box character in the document and have seen it show up before.

Generally, this is seen when a document was created in one version of Word and is opened in another. Not sure why this happens but it has never given me a problem - I simply delete this extraneous character - which I can do in your attached document.