Random numbers appearing in a Word document

[zebebedee]

Hi.
My girlfriend's been having a problem with Word 2003 for some time now.
Essentially, random numbers appear at random places throughout her word
documents at random times. They appear at a rate of two or three an
hour in a large (30 pages) document. Does anyone have an idea what sort
of problem this might be?
Thanks!

 

[Pesach Shelnitz]

Hi,

I can think of two reasons why "random numbers" might appear in a Word
document.
1) Word displays the hexadecimal value of any character if you press Alt+X.
Try it. Press Alt+X after any letter, number, punctuation mark, or space, and
that character will be replaced by a four-digit hexadecimal number (a number
that may include the letters A, B, C, D, E, and F). Pressing Alt+X again
removes the number and restores the original character. Thus, if you
accidentally press Alt+X while typing, "random numbers" will appear in your
doc.
2) Field codes, such as PAGE and others, can produce numbers wherever they
happen to be. Go to the location of one of these "random numbers" and press
Alt+F9, which reveals all the field codes in your document. Pressing Alt+F9
again hides the field codes. If the "random number" disappears and you see
something in curly brackets instead, like {PAGE}, a field code is generating
it. If this is the case, write back and tell us the field code that you see,
and someone may be able to tell you why that field code is appearing and how
to solve your problem.