Microsoft Word 2007-opening old documents

[Nancy]

Hi,

I can't find a newsgroup on this one for Word. But thought just maybe I
could help someone else if they have this problem... I had made many
Microsoft documents on Word 97. Some of them are opening in 2007 with a
bunch of symbols instead of with the font in which I composed them. After
calling support it was found I have to copy and paste the document into a
Word PAD document and correct it there, then copy and paste the corrected
version back into a Word 2007 document. But then all my formatting is gone
such as page size, margins, columns, etc. You would think all I would've
needed to do was "select all", then change the font but when I tried that
all it did was make lots of square boxes where letters should be ... all
uniform. I would like to know how to keep my setup the same on these so
called "corrupted" files (that still are fine on the old computer by the
way). At least I can get English again but lost all the extras.

Thanks,
Nancy

 

[R. McCarty]

Interesting. Depending on how many documents you have to migrate I'd
probably try to locate someone with Office XP or Office 2003. Migrate
the 97 documents to those native .Doc formats and then take those into
Office 2007. Must be too large a format transition going from 97-2007.

 

[Nancy]

But then why would some of them open and not others?

 

[gls858]

But then why would some of them open and not others?

Are the ones that are opening and the ones that aren't, using the same
font? It may just be that the font in your old documents isn't available
on 2007. I know for sure that they changed the default font from 2003
to 2007.

gls858

 

[Nancy]

If it is not an available font I could understand that but I can't even
"select all" and change it to an available font. When I did "select all"
and tried any of the common fonts such as Times New Roman or Arial, it
simply changes all those symbols to empty square blocks. One time it put
question marks in the square blocks! Go figure! Is there some bug in the
program that they are working on, or is this something that hasn't happened
before?

 

[Nancy]

Are the ones that are opening and the ones that aren't, using the same
font? It may just be that the font in your old documents isn't available
on 2007. I know for sure that they changed the default font from 2003
to 2007.

gls858

OK, got it. The original document was in Times New Roman Special but Word
2007 does not have that font. You were right on! However I would've
thought I could've still changed the font and been done with it. Will these
symbols be unchangeable every time I try to open a document with a now
non-existant font? Or is something else going on here?
Thanks,
Nancy