it's that it is a character set problem between different applications. And those are notoriously difficult to solve, sometimes even impossible.

And, of course, we've got to take into account also the character set of the users PC. He may type something that is a pound on his PC, but not a pound for the server, let alone for your Word.

In fact, if I type a euro-symbol (I'm in Holland) as a description of a payment in my electronic banking system, it's represented as an inverse question mark (like the Spanish use at the start of a sentence) on the printed statement the receiver gets.
And then we're talking about professionally managed systems, all of one and the same bank, with a euro symbol being more standard than the English pound symbol.

So this is really difficult. It might help to write an xml- or html-document with the right character set in stead of a Word 2003 document.

Kees