HELP! "Boxes" Problem with Microsoft Word

[3113]

Help me out here folks!

So, I have Microsoft Office for Mac 2008. I write a story and it looks fine. I save it '97-2004 as that is what the person on the other end has. They don't use a Mac, but a PC. It looks fine on my end.

They get the story, and it's full of "boxes" like this: "Now[] is the winter[]of our[]discontent." The boxes are everywhere. And no, I'm not sure the boxes are just "spaces" because I don't usually see it. It may be letters as well.

I have tried sending them the story in a different font. No good. I've tried saving it as a Template and sending it that way. No good. I've tried RTF. No good. They get it, and it's full of boxes. And sometimes, they send it back and I get boxes!

This is really annoying. But outside of them getting a Mac or me getting a PC...what should we do? I tried searching the web and I can't think of a way to describe this problem that gets me an answer. I know there must be others having this problem. And there has to be a solution other than just removing the boxes by hand. On their end or on mine.

Help!

 

[TxRad]

Help me out here folks!

So, I have Microsoft Office for Mac 2008. I write a story and it looks fine. I save it '97-2004 as that is what the person on the other end has. They don't use a Mac, but a PC. It looks fine on my end.

They get the story, and it's full of "boxes" like this: "Now[] is the winter[]of our[]discontent." The boxes are everywhere. And no, I'm not sure the boxes are just "spaces" because I don't usually see it. It may be letters as well.

I have tried sending them the story in a different font. No good. I've tried saving it as a Template and sending it that way. No good. I've tried RTF. No good. They get it, and it's full of boxes. And sometimes, they send it back and I get boxes!

This is really annoying. But outside of them getting a Mac or me getting a PC...what should we do? I tried searching the web and I can't think of a way to describe this problem that gets me an answer. I know there must be others having this problem. And there has to be a solution other than just removing the boxes by hand. On their end or on mine.

Help!

Try text only with line breaks.

 

[LettersFromTatyana]

Have you been using track changes? If so, try accepting all changes.

Another approach might be to select the entire document, copy it, and then paste special--unformatted text. There might be some weird formatting that is having problems going through.

 

[3113]

"Squares" not "Boxes"

Thanks for the help, everyone! Update--using the word "squares" rather than "boxes" I found mention of this problem. Unfortunately, almost all having this problem using a PC and opening old files. Not my problem where it looks good on my end but not the other end.

I mean, that's the problem right? I don't know if the file is corrupted when I send it to them, or if their program corrupts it when they open it. Or maybe it's corrupted on both ends?

One suggestion was to open the file in Open Office and save it in that program. I'm trying that now. Any other thoughts much appreciated.

 

[jomar]

Yes, Open Office was what I was going to suggest. Or maybe using word pad.

 

[oggbashan]

I think that the settings both of you use in Word are currently incompatible.

I have experienced that when sending files to people whose native language isn't English. They had Word set up for French, or German or another language.

The format that was least confusing was .txt with line breaks. Almost any wordprocessor seemed to cope with that.

 

[3113]

I have experienced that when sending files to people whose native language isn't English. They had Word set up for French, or German or another language.

Yes, quite a few of the internet posts talking about this problem mention that it might have to do with language. One of the suggestions was, in fact, to do away entirely with all Chinese language options--but the steps toward doing that were through MS Word for PC, not Mac, so, again, maybe the problem is on the other end, not my end.

I do know that there's no translations going on here--unless MS Word has subtle differences for English spoken in different parts of the U.S. Which, I could almost believe. Sometimes I get an edit back from these people that has me scratching my head over how they read a word vs. how I read it

 

[CarlusMagnus]

They get the story, and it's full of "boxes" like this: "Now[] is the winter[]of our[]discontent." The boxes are everywhere. And no, I'm not sure the boxes are just "spaces" because I don't usually see it. It may be letters as well.

Boxes like this sometimes appear when you've used a character that's available in your font but not in the other person's. Can your correspondent send you a screen capture of several lines so that you can see exactly where the boxes appear and match them with what they're supposed to be? Or, failing that, can your correspondent describe a line of text to you, giving exactly the positions where the boxes are?

 

[Weird Harold]

What you're seeing is What happens when Word sees a special charracter or formatting command it doesn't recognise. I get the squares for things like single-character elipses or smart quotes from a different version of Word or a different wordprocesser.

one solution is to highlight a square, copy it, paste into the "find" field of word's find and replace function. replace with a blank field to delete them or with the correct special character if you can figure out which it should be.

One problem with the technique is that not all squares are the same value for the find function; you'll have to repeat for each special-character that isn't recognised.

The long-term solution is to reconfigure a Word style template to turn off auto-correct and things like smart quotes, non-break-spaces, conditional-hyphens, etc.

 

[3113]

What you're seeing is What happens when Word sees a special charracter or formatting command it doesn't recognise. I get the squares for things like single-character elipses or smart quotes from a different version of Word or a different wordprocesser.

one solution is to highlight a square, copy it, paste into the "find" field of word's find and replace function. replace with a blank field to delete them or with the correct special character if you can figure out which it should be.

One problem with the technique is that not all squares are the same value for the find function; you'll have to repeat for each special-character that isn't recognised.

The long-term solution is to reconfigure a Word style template to turn off auto-correct and things like smart quotes, non-break-spaces, conditional-hyphens, etc.

Good answers, WH! I can certainly reconfigure on my end, while sending your advice to the person on the other end about the find/replace. Thanks!

 

[Weird Harold]

Good answers, WH! I can certainly reconfigure on my end, while sending your advice to the person on the other end about the find/replace. Thanks!

I had Word 97 configured so that it only used ASCII charracter codes (plain text) but the death of that computer has forced an "upgrade" to "windows 2011 starter" which doesn't like being reconfigured to anthing but M$ assumptions and defaults.

 

[CarlusMagnus]

I had Word 97 configured so that it only used ASCII charracter codes (plain text) but the death of that computer has forced an "upgrade" to "windows 2011 starter" which doesn't like being reconfigured to anthing but M$ assumptions and defaults.

So find a decent text editor and work in that. For Mac users, I heartily recommend BBEdit or its freeware version TextWrangler.

 

[3113]

So find a decent text editor and work in that. For Mac users, I heartily recommend BBEdit or its freeware version TextWrangler.

I use Scrivener and love it. Unfortunately, the people I need to send my stuff to use Word, so that's what I've got to work in, whether it works best for me or not

 

[CarlusMagnus]

I use Scrivener and love it. Unfortunately, the people I need to send my stuff to use Word, so that's what I've got to work in, whether it works best for me or not

Write in your text editor, and then cut and paste into the abomination.

 

[estragon]

I'd convert files incompatible with Microsoft Word for Macintosh 2004 (my wordprocessing program) using TextEdit, then try to find a compatible option. Worked generally.

 

[estragon]

I'd convert files incompatible with Microsoft Word for Macintosh 2004 (my wordprocessing program) using TextEdit, then try to find a compatible option. Worked generally.

 

[Liar]

Even Microsoft admits it's a PITA. Here are some things that might help.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/892960

 

[D_Lynn]

I use Scrivener and love it. Unfortunately, the people I need to send my stuff to use Word, so that's what I've got to work in, whether it works best for me or not

I use Scrivener and have exported text to Word for short stories on Lit. It does have one minor issue - all italics are converted to underlined text. I don't know if this is just my issue or one with Scrivener. I haven't taken the time to troubleshoot. But this might be an alternative to introducing another text editor.

Update...I just downloaded the latest fixes for Scrivener and the export issue is solved. Is there another reason for not exporting to Word using Scrivener that I am not aware of?

 

[3113]

Update...I just downloaded the latest fixes for Scrivener and the export issue is solved. Is there another reason for not exporting to Word using Scrivener that I am not aware of?

Oh, I can export what I have from Scrivener as Word document just fine. I haven't and maybe I should try to do that as I just tried with Open Office--to see if that solves the boxes problem. The reason I haven't done this is because the document goes back and forth. Those I send it to send it back with comments and edits and such.

How does one get the word document back into Scrivener? Along with comments? When I pick "import" on Scrivener, my word documents are "grayed" and there is no picking them. And cut-and-paste won't--I don't think--bring over the comments that are all in "Reviewing."

Easier to keep it all in Word. But as it seems that only my first send of that first document usually has the "boxes" problem (though, now and again, I get it back that way, too), maybe I'll put the stories in Scrivener, export them out as Word and see if that makes a difference.

 

[TxRad]

Some things to check in word:

Go to tools, options, view. Make sure everything under Formatting Marks is unchecked.

click on the compatibility tab and make sure everything there is unchecked.

 

[D_Lynn]

Oh, I can export what I have from Scrivener as Word document just fine. I haven't and maybe I should try to do that as I just tried with Open Office--to see if that solves the boxes problem. The reason I haven't done this is because the document goes back and forth. Those I send it to send it back with comments and edits and such.

How does one get the word document back into Scrivener? Along with comments? When I pick "import" on Scrivener, my word documents are "grayed" and there is no picking them. And cut-and-paste won't--I don't think--bring over the comments that are all in "Reviewing."

I think you can only import rtf documents. There is a setting under Scrivener preferences - Import/Export where you can select to import comments as inline annotations. Not sure if that will help or not. I have never tried to import into Scrivener. And now I'm beginning to realize just how little I know about this application.

Easier to keep it all in Word. But as it seems that only my first send of that first document usually has the "boxes" problem (though, now and again, I get it back that way, too), maybe I'll put the stories in Scrivener, export them out as Word and see if that makes a difference.

I know what you mean. I've been keeping my docs in Word on my Windows laptop. I also have iWork for my Mac, but Pages seems to have a different issue with exporting to Word - all italics look like they're there, but according to MS Word, they are not. The guys who review story submissions on Lit caught this and sent me a note on it. I had to edit the entire document manually in native MS Word to fix.

But Scrivener is so awesome, I'd rather use it for all my writing projects. And I'm hoping it's as easy as people claim it is to export to Kindle format for Amazon. I haven't tried it, yet.