Word Symbol gont to letter font conversion?

["Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

Nina Panzica reports: <<I formatted my "Normal" font in a Word 2000 document
to use the Wingdings font instead of Times New Roman.  Well, that turned
most of my document into a mush of strange symbols as most of the fonts had
been
originally based upon Normal's style.  So I immediately reformatted my
Normal paragaph style back to Times New Roman. But instead of getting my
text back, I got little white squares!>>

The bad news is that this used to be a documented bug in Word; I remember
thinking "what a great way to encrypt a message against viewing by a naive
reader--convert it into Symbol!", and discovering to my annoyance (as I
wasn't seriously planning to do this) that the process worked only one way.
Though I hadn't heard that this has been corrected in Word 2000, I wasn't
able to duplicate the problem in an updated version of Word 97 (SR-2). That
suggests there may be a service release somewhere on the Microsoft Web site
that will let you fix the problem. (Fortunately/unfortunately, our MIS staff
are always updating things behind our backs, so I have no idea what patch
they've applied most recently.) If not, head over to "Woody's Office Watch"
(www.woodyswatch.com or www.wopr.com) and look for their online discussion
groups; one of the rocket scientists there may be able to help you.

If nothing else works, you could try is saving the file as text, which
should lose the font information and (with luck) restore the English
alphabet.

--Geoff Hart, FERIC, Pointe-Claire, Quebec
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
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