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General discussion

Microsoft Word Cyrillic Characters-Bizarre Problem

Apr 20, 2007 2:50PM PDT

This is a really strange thing that is happening to me with Microsoft Word 2007. For the symbols that you can insert, you can assign a shortcut key to a symbol. For example, I assigned Alt+Shift+D to display the capital Greek letter delta. I assigned Alt+K to show the lowercase Greek letter kappa. I did this for all the Greek letters. Now for some reason, after I type a few Greek words using this method (by pressing Alt and then the letter keys), I go to type just the letter keys without pressing Alt and for some reason, when I press a letter key, a Cyrillic letter is displayed. For some reason, I cannot type using the Latin Alphabet, it types in the Cyrillic alphabet instead. After I exit Microsoft Word and start it up again, it's back to normal typing the Latin Alphabet. What the hell is going on? Why is it switching to Cyrillic? Does it have something to do with pressing Alt and other letter keys?

Discussion is locked

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Is your ALT key getting stuck?
Apr 20, 2007 8:19PM PDT

Just a thought. With my own keyboard my SHIFT key gets stuck sometimes, and I GET WORDS< AND SENTENCES like this. (The < is the comma shifted up).

It is most annoying. It's not physically stuck down, but acts like it is.

Mark

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Russian
Apr 22, 2007 10:00AM PDT

No, it's not that. Something is switching the default language on Microsoft Word from English to Russian. This time, I assigned the ALT key to show Russian letters instead of Greek and whenever I type a Russian word or two by pressing ALT+A, ALT+B, etc. at the bottom of the screen, the default language is listed as Russian. It doesn't matter if I change the default to English, because it changes right back. The only way to get it back to English is to exit Microsoft Word.

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Yes, that is strange
Apr 22, 2007 6:35PM PDT

All I can think of at the moment is StickyKeys. Look up StickyKeys in your computer's Help and Support and see if there is anything there that might help.

The other thing that we often suggest is Word's "Normal.dot" file. Normal.dot is Word's template where all changes to settings are stored, including macros.

If Normal.dot gets corrupted or if changes are made that cannot be changed back, deleting Normal.dot will force Word to create a new Normal.dot with default values when Word is next opened. Search your computer for all instances of Normal.dot and either rename them or delete them. See if that reverses the changes.

I am assuming that Office 2007 uses Normal.dot the way previous versions of Word does.

Mark

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4-year-old document suddenly has Russian Cyrillic letters
Nov 5, 2015 8:47AM PST

A user called me up this morning, and asked if his computer had been hacked. After a few moments I determined that the problem was only in one Word document, which the user had authored 4 years previously. By knowing what the sounds of the Russian letters were, I was able to see that each letter had been substituted in the document, for rough equivalents in Russian Cyrillic. No translation was done. X was substituted for C. The English dipthong ng, showed in the document as nu gamma. Additional typing in that document produced more transliteration.
A different instance of Word produced a fully functional word processor, with the usual American English alphabet, working normally. Copy and paste from the old docment to the new blank document leaves Cyrillic in the new document.
The user had not seen the document for over a year. He has no idea how it happened. He does not know how to change the document back.

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As you do Word support.
Nov 5, 2015 8:59AM PST

You know about normal.dot issues. That one goes back over a decade so I'll note it and wait for your new post. This thread is over 8 years old so I take it all you need is a reminder (and next time a new discussion.)