Letters Turn Into Squares

Keli,
If you do that, won't you lose all your formatting, including bullets, numbering, and tables?

Ctrl + A the entire document then copy and paste it into a sticky note. Then copy everything in the sticky note to a notepad document. Then copy that into a new/clean word document and boom! Hope it helps

I did it all but it didn't work!

Need how to fix corrupted files tips for Word 2013 and Office 365 please!

Try to copy into Excel and then change font. Sometimes that will work.

My problem is SIMILAR and I still cannot fix it.
I was sent two documents created in Publisher. The documents are IDENTICAL - with the only exception being that one was in color and one was in black and white. Before I continue, I get these documents every month and never had an issue.

I was customizing the documents and I always do them at the same time. First one, then the other for each bit of customization to ensure I have not forgotten anything.

When I attempted to change
name
street address
city, state 00000

to the actual information in the black and white document, each time I to type a w or a v, it would be a little square.

This did not happen when I did the same thing in the color version!

I even tried inserting the characters from the character map!

As I said, I do this every month - and this time, there was NO getting around it.

Thanks in advance!
rob

This was an excellent tip, as usual. Many, Many Thanks. My documents where confusing at first glance. Some of the text was fine, normal. Other sections had the squares, the epsilon, greek, and general mess. Using advice from both versions of this tip article I was able to bring things under control. These documents were originally created on a Mac Word 2009 or possibly earlier. Applying a different font across the board did not eliminate the squares, neither did stripping out the formatting. Applying styles directly to the document did the trick. Using the style inspector to help a colleague gives one the sense that you're bringing fire to the natives. I later found the design tab can help the situation to some degree, but not reliably across different documents - at least in this case. side note: my friends wanted to send the docs to a compatibility factory, whatever that is. Thank you.

In my situation, I opened a document and all the fonts were suddenly in Greek. It doesn't occur on all the documents I have, but a fair portion of them. I sent the document to a coworker, he opened it and printed it and it came out just fine. He saved it and sent it back to me, and it still opens in Greek. The Ctrl-space changed everything into the boxes, and the undo command returned the Greek letters. Text boxes within the document are displayed in English, however. MS Community recommended running a macro on the whole document, but that only seems like it would compound the problem. The font indicated is 'Romantic' which I do not have installed on my system and have never used. The document used the 'normal' template and I prefer Times New Roman for my documents, with occasional forays into Aston-f1 or something else for emphasis.
Any suggestions?
Thanks! TS

I had a problem with Word 2010 replacing some letters with squares. It was originally a Word 2003 document, but I had been working with it for a couple of years with 2010 without problem. It happened suddenly and it only affected those words that had 'All Caps' selected in Fond, and that were also in Bold font. I could physically remove the box and type in the correct letters, but as soon as I saved the document, the squares would return. The font was Arial Bold, and by chance I discovered if I changed the font to plain Arial, and then made the word 'bold' the problem stopped.