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General discussion

my auto correct/format

Nov 9, 2005 7:47AM PST

has failed. For some reason, when I type the characters for a smilie : - ), it does not change to a smiling face. I check the Auto Correct options and the faces of the smilies have disappeared. I'm using Office 2003 Word & Outlook & WinXP Pro and never had these problems with Office 2000 & Win98se. I wanted to delete some fonts but didn't & that is when the problems began. Can someone Help? I use these symbols a lot & have uninstalled/re-installed at least 10 times but nothing seems to help.

Whitesnake

Discussion is locked

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Re: auto correct
Nov 9, 2005 5:50PM PST

"I wanted to delete some fonts, but didn't, and that is when these problems began".
- Why did you want to delete some fonts, and which fonts?
- Why did you decide not to do it?
- Obviously you did something, or things wouldn't have changed? What exactly did you do?

"I uninstalled and reinstalled at least 10 times"
- What did you uninstall and reinstall? Fonts? Office 2003? Windows XP?

And 2 other questions:
- Did you already delete normal.dot? Might help.
- What happens if you add the autocorrect entries for the smilies manually again, now they disappeared mysteriously?

Kees

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Sorry Kees, didn't explain
Nov 10, 2005 8:22AM PST

it well enough, did I? It was some fonts that I never use, like Billboard and all the really heavy fonts. Instinct is why I didn't but they weren't any core fonts.
I didn't do a thing as far as I remember, it was Office 2003 ... don't want to reinstall XP Pro, if I can help it.
Normal.dot is always saved as a seperate document as I have normal.dot[1] and normal.dot[the orignal] but is set to my settings. I cannot add the autocorrect entries for the smilies manually ... the program won't allow me. If I could do that I would and wouldn't be asking for help. Sorry for the sarcasm but I couldn't help when I'd already explained what I was asking for help with.

Whitesnake

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It might help ...
Nov 10, 2005 7:34PM PST

somebody else to help you if you would be more explicit.

A corrupted normal.dot can have all kinds of consequences, although I don't know if the autocorrect is saved there. You may have more than one, and it may be set to your settings, but still it can be corrupted. It won't harm to rename it (all of them maybe) and see if that helps. If not, rename them back.

"the program won't allow me" tells just nothing. Explain what you do, and what error message appears. Can you add other autocorrect entries tham smilies, or none at all?

Seems a job for Frank, once the problem is clear.

Kees

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Can't add any
Nov 12, 2005 7:31AM PST

other autocorrect icons, smilies whatever! It does the spell check okay but the 2 or 3 keystrokes that are needed to make a smilie the following ones : - ), which put together make a smilie or these : - ( which make the sad face DO NOT in my Office 2003 in Word or Outlook and anything I add as a shortcut for words I use a lot, those don't work either. The normal doc setting are okay, I'm having to use 2000 until I sort out 2003 [2000 is on a different hdd to 2003] and they work fine. So it is the program itself, it has been completely taken out, even from the registry when I uninstall but it still goes wrong somehow on re-installing.
Thanks for the ideas but those are what I tried over 3 wks ago when it first went wrong.

whitesnake.

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Just wanted you
Nov 15, 2005 6:44AM PST

to know that, in the end, I managed to fix this problem myself.
I uninstalled Office 2003, taking out all references to it ... installed Office 2000, left it in for 24 hrs to make sure everything was OK, then Upgraded to Office 2003, just letting it do the work it was meant to do and after 24 hrs downloaded the SP2 for Office and apart from having too many fonts, I'm happy.

Everything is OK.

Whitesnake.