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Have an office that just got all new Dell's that have Office 2007 on them. Upon opening documents saved in Word 95-2003 (I think that's the proper term) .doc file format all ' symbols (apostrophe's) come up as = (equal signs). This is happening on most, if not all Word documents. I have Googled the bejeezus out of this but no luck.
FYI, the save option in Word 2007 has been set to save in .doc format not .docx if that matters.
I don't know why your problem is occurring but I would like to recommend that you get Open Office why: Why OpenOffice.org It is free and does everything that the Microsoft product does. No need to support Microsoft.
I posted this on a couple other forums in the hopes of reaching the most people. Another user offered this up. I haven't tried it yet though.
1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit in the Open box, and then click OK.
2. Locate and then click the following subkey in the registry:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\W ord\Options
3. On the Edit menu, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
4. Type DontResetInsertionPointProperties , and then press ENTER.
5. On the Edit menu, click Modify.
6. Type 1 , and then click OK.
7. Exit Registry Editor.
Also , you might want to try and find out if something is 'localized' to Europe or somewhere else outside of the US. I don't remember if Word has this nonesense, but some apps try to adjust for common formatting and keyboard differences in various countries. I used to know more about that, but since I've retired -- I just don't care.
I have no clue what the registry change does, but I'll add the standard warning -- be careful. Registry changes happen immediately, there's no save button. This one seems simple, so you can probably just do it. For more complicated ones, it can be worth saving a copy of the registry before changing. You can import it back if your change really messes you up.
You have old Doc files from office 95-2003 and when you open them in 2007 then 2007 is changing them.. Right??
If that is the case I would look at the autocorrect feature.. It is probably in there to make an * into and = sign..
The auto format and correction can do some strange things..
Yeah that's right. Old 2003 docs into Word 2007. You'd think it'd be no big deal and hasn't on other computers I've worked on, but for some reason this batch of new PC's are having the problems.
Also, I tried the registry trick but no dice. It had no effect that I could see. So the problem remains!
Problem still continues. Auto-correct looks fine and it wasn't messed with when we did the initial install of the PC's. Today we realized that most of the documents (at least the ones that we looked at as examples today) were previously wordperfect documents that were then opened in word 2003, saved in the 97-2003 format and then opened later in Word 2007 when we put the new computers. Do you think this might be the culprit? Or would that even have any affect on them?