copied text inserts as hidden in Word (any version)

[Guest]

We are writers of technical documents and we often copy text, from a few
words to several paragraphs from one document to another that we may be
writing.
We incorporate hidden text (editiing instructions) within these documents
for other end users of our product. Very often when copying text we find that
the text changes its properties to be hidden and also "boxed" in the document
where it is placed. This seems to be random and will often be just 1 or 2
paragraph's out of a half a page that might be copied. We notice lines
missing, turn on the hiden text and there it is. This occurs whether or not
it is being inserted in areas where hidden text already exists.
Is there a way to prevent this from happening?

 

[Shauna Kelly]

Hi Martin

Does the following help?
Why does text change format when I copy it into another document?
http://www.ShaunaKelly.com/word/styles/FormatOfTextChanges.html

Hope this helps.

Shauna Kelly. Microsoft MVP.
http://www.shaunakelly.com/word

 

[Guest]

Yes, this helps to some degree, however I'm not sure that it answers the main
problem. Along with the text being hidden, we do have times when it happens
just as you decribed in the help article.
However, most of our documents are formatted the same becuse we have
standardized formats for the specifications which we write. I can take two
documents formatted nearly identical and say, copy 4 long paragraph's of
information that I want to use in another document, say paragraphs A through
E. What happens is that one of the paragraph's, perhaps "B" will not appear
when we copy it to the new document. When we turn on hidden text we find the
paragraph is indeed there , even in the correct font, but is hidden and also
there has been a border/box added around that paragraph.

At one point in the past we used to place borders around all of our hidden
text (the help notes that we do plce in the document as hidden text). These
documents are many generations old, some older than others, but some
literally are offspring that may have been originally generated YEARS ago in
much older versions of Word. We continually "update" these master documents
to keep them current. At some point in the past, there could have been hidden
text with a border around it within the text we are now copying, but it does
not exist now. Could it be there is actually some hidden code left over in
these old documents that somehow are brought out while using the copy
command?? I'm tempted to bring these documents up in Word Perfect so that I
can view all of the document code which is a feature they have. Is there ANY
way to view this hidden code in Word to see if this is why we have this
problem?
Thanks!!

 

[Klaus Linke]

Hi Martin,

The probability that the style issues described in Shauna's article are responsible are close to 100%.

Next time it happens, look at the character and paragraph styles.
And copy the styles from the target doc into the source doc: You'll probably see the paragraph vanishing in the source doc, too.

You can run a macro to warn you about hidden styles in a doc:

Dim myStyle As Style
For Each myStyle In ActiveDocument.Styles
If myStyle.Font.Hidden = True Then
MsgBox "Style """ & myStyle.NameLocal & """ is hidden"
End If
Next myStyle

Regards,
Klaus

 

[Klaus Linke]

Since you have some styles that should be hidden, use this macro to warn you:

Dim myStyle As Style
For Each myStyle In ActiveDocument.Styles
Select Case myStyle
Case "hidden style 1", "hidden style 2"
If myStyle.Font.Hidden = False Then
MsgBox "Style """ & myStyle.NameLocal & """ is not hidden"
End If
Case Else
If myStyle.Font.Hidden = True Then
MsgBox "Style """ & myStyle.NameLocal & """ is hidden"
End If
End Select

(Change "hidden style 1" ... to your hidden styles)

Klaus