Thank you for being a valued part of the CNET community. As of December 1, 2020, the forums are in read-only format. In early 2021, CNET Forums will no longer be available. We are grateful for the participation and advice you have provided to one another over the years.

Thanks,

CNET Support

General discussion

Word 2003: fields in my text boxes have turned invisible!

Jan 22, 2011 2:06AM PST

Hey folks,

I have a document with almost 40 pictures, each of which has a caption in a text box grouped with the picture. Today I opened up my document to discover that for every single one of these, the numbers of the captions were missing, i.e. "Picture 2: A potato" became "Picture : A potato".

I should make it clear that the fields are still there:
?By right-clicking just before the colon, I get "Update field", "edit field", and "Toggle field codes" as options, and when I go into "edit field" the field code appears correct;
?All cross-references in the document referring to these captions have their numbers intact, even after manual updating;
?Adding a new caption to the end of the document comes up as it should, "Picture 39"
?Copying and pasting "Picture :" into a different place in the document causes the number to reappear, so long as it's not being pasted into one of the affected text boxes.
Hitting Alt+F9 (after the text box has been ungrouped from the accompanying picture, of course) doesn't give me the field codes, however: those, too, are invisible. New fields of any type that are added to the affected text boxes are also invisible. Field codes added to new text boxes are, however, perfectly fine.

Now, I could obviously separate each of the text boxes from its picture, create new captions in new text boxes under each picture, and manually copy-paste the text of each caption into the text box once again. But life is short as it is, and I don't have any guarantee that when I reopen the file tomorrow the numbers in the new text boxes won't have all turned invisible once again.

Anybody know what's going on and how to fix it?

Thanks,
Daniel

Discussion is locked

- Collapse -
Re: invisible
Jan 22, 2011 6:45AM PST

First thing to find out. Is this an issue with (a) this document, (b) this users settings (Word) and profile (Windows) or (c) this Word on this computer.

- You can find out if it's (a) by seeing how a copy from your backup behaves. Be sure to make it read-only on the backup or copy it first. You wouldn't want to corrupt you only good copy!
- You can find out if it's (b) by opening the same document (and the backup copy) in a new Windows account on the same PC. If that works, you can try to delete normal.dot, but that won't help if it's something else that is corrupted.
- You can find out if it's (c) by opening the document (and the backup copy) on another PC. If that's the case, try reinstalling Word.

Kees

- Collapse -
Most useful response so far
Jan 23, 2011 1:56AM PST

I've asked this question in a number of forums and your response was the most useful. I found out something very interesting, followed immediately by something very odd.

The something interesting: Though I had a copy saved on a disk-on-key, it had the same problem as this one. Yet I found out it's a problem specifically from in these documents because by hitting Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C, Ctrl+N, Ctrl+V, all of the numbers appeared as normal in the new document!

The something odd: Shortly after I did so (and was working on restoring the occasional style that had disappeared in the transfer), Word crashed and I had to end the process from task manager. Both the original and the Ctrl-ACNV'd document were still open at the time. When I reopened Word, it hadn't yet performed an autosave on the new file so it didn't offer me a recovery of that one, but the Repaired version of the original file had all of its numbers intact again! It reported to me a huge honking list of repairs it had made to pretty much every image and text box in the document when I went to save it.

So things appear okay now, and while I'm still a bit nervous that one day I'll open Word up and they'll disappear again, at least I know I can always copy/paste the information into a new document. I guess the document somehow got damaged and I had saved it to both locations without noticing.