Boxes Appear in Documents Saved from Word as Text Only

• Microsoft Word for Windows, version 6.0

SYMPTOMS

Documents opened in Word 6.0 for Windows may display small boxes at the beginning of the paragraphs.

CAUSE

This problem occurs when a document containing a table is saved using the "Text Only" file format.

STATUS

Microsoft is researching this problem and will post new information here in the Microsoft Knowledge Base as it becomes available.

MORE INFORMATION

Word writes out a carriage return (CR) instead a carriage return/line feed (CR/LF) in place of a table cell mark when saving a document as Text Only. The document ends up with more carriage returns in it than carriage return/line feed pairs. The next time this file is opened in Word, Word surveys the file for the type of separators present, if it determines that the file has predominantly CR separators, it assumes that this is a Mac text file.

Since Mac text files use only carriage returns as separators, any LF characters are treated as extraneous and are drawn as boxes. You can delete these extraneous characters from the file.