Weird Word problem

Gers

One of the subjects I teach at college is numeracy. I’ve inherited a good number of old worksheets written in Word.

When checking them I saw that in cases where a ‘divided by’ symbol should be there was an addition sign so I trawled through everything, inserting the correct symbol, saving and closing the documents.

Today I wanted to use the VAT worksheet. All the addition symbols were back. Changed them to the divide symbol, saved and closed the document. Opened it to find all the changed symbols gone back to addition.

Think I’m going mad! Is there a rational explanation for this please? Will I have to retype everything?

Thanks.

debitcardmayhem

Did you use e.g. 12/8 or 12÷8 perhaps it's down to formatting? I don't have access to my Windows office machine at the moment so I can't check

Gers

debitcardmayhem wrote: »

Did you use e.g. 12/8 or 12÷8 perhaps it's down to formatting? I don't have access to my Windows office machine at the moment so I can't check

The latter. These students wouldn’t understand the / from a keyboard. I inserted the symbol via the ‘insert >symbol’ on the ribbon.

Cheers

AndyPix

question : If you choose "save as" and save it as a new document . close word and open the new document - does the same thing happen ?


Oh, and are the documents .docx , .doc, or .rtf ?


and - if you create a new document (not edit an existing one), put in some divide symbols, save and reopen - do the same symptoms happen ?

that

I would guess font, or the font selection they used.

Unless they saved the font and embedded it into the document, when you open the document word will choose the substitute character set that matches that code which in your case is a +.

Not all font sets carry mathematical symbols.


Another issue is that I would think you have a newer version or word, and the documents are "converted", and it not always exactly like for like even between different versions of word.


in windows I'd go to start, start typing character map, note down the character set with a good looking divide sign and decent text
I'd copy an unadulterated document.
open the copied document, select all, and change the font to the above character set and the divide sign may come back?

Without being infront of it, it is just a guess though

Gers

Thanks - I will do all those things tomorrow / Friday.

Yes, they are old .doc documents, probably 2003.

Thanks for the info and suggestions. I will report back.

esuhl

Might be barking up the wrong tree, but I vaguely remember that there was an option in Word to "embed TrueType fonts".

If the font containing the divide symbol is only available to Word and not the whole system, and font embedding isn't enabled, I *think* that might cause such a problem.

that

esuhl wrote: »

Might be barking up the wrong tree, but I vaguely remember that there was an option in Word to "embed TrueType fonts".

Yes there was, and I think still is. Depending on the version of word you can either embed the font, or only the font characters used. The default though was to embed nothing.

stragglebod

Font is a possible explanation, though I don't think I've ever seen a font that uses the + symbol for ÷

And if the font isn't embedded and Word defaults to Wingdings you should get a block arrow rather than a +.