Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Technical Help and How To's My WORD has gone crazy

It's done this to me before, but I can't remember how I fixed it... probably just started a new document. But it's starting up on me again... so...

I highlight a couple of words I want to bold or italicize and instead of just bolding or italicizing those few words it pretends I have selected the entire document. If I then click on the undo button (once) then it undoes the whole document, except what I wanted selected. Weird.

As I mentioned above, it has done this to be from time to time, and it's darn annoying, because if I don't catch it in time, it will ERASE all the previous bolding or italicizing I've done previously in the document, meaning I have to go back through and figure out what I had marked before. Not so hard for bolding, but I often use italics for emphasis, dreams, flashback dialogue, etc. so if that gets erased, then I get really .

If anyone knows how to fix this problem, I would appreciate it. BTW, I have WORD 2007.

Hi Virginia:
I don't know if I'm going to be much help. I took your post and put it into Word 2007 on my machine and did a whole bunch of mods like you describe. I did get everything erased when I went back far enough and came up with the original blank file.
I guess my suggestion is to use the "save" frequently between changes. I know it is easy to loose track of the changes when doing a lot of them.
I couldn't recreate that. That has me flummoxed, but you can try the solution below:
Another option is to save versions if you aren't sure about what you've changed and might want to change it again.
You can always save a "master" file or a "template" that you can go back to if the whole thing goes into destruct mode.
I use that trick frequently when I do my artwork and have several versions that I want to choose from later.
Good luck.
Artemis

Virginia,

Could you try what the following page suggests to see if it helps?

Microsoft Community

The original post sounds like what you are going through.

malu

Thanks for the suggestion, Artemis. I do tend to save a lot.

Thanks for the link, Malu. That does sound exactly like my problem. After I posted this thread, I downloaded all available Microsoft updates, and even though none were specifically for WORD, the problem has gone away for now. If it comes back (crossing fingers that it doesn't), I'll try to that solution.

Yes, I did notice that if I copy text from one type of format to another, this is more likely to happen. Even if I've "changed" or reformatted it to supposedly be all the same. Like little children WORD documents don't like change. Sigh.

Even though I've joined the Borg that is Microsoft WORD, I still remember fondly the user friendliness of WordPerfect.

Another WordPerfect user!! Yay! (Haven't actually used that in a while though, mostly just use Wordpad on my machine 'cuz it makes code and sending docs easy and sometimes Microsoft Word since WordPerfect started going buggy on me...)

Just a thought. Are using the shortcut keys? Because if not, that might help out, and if you are, you might want to double check that you haven't accidentally messed with them.

Hope your issue doesn't come back! We need your stories on here!