Number 236 - January 2003

Why Do I Get ASCII Boxes in E-mail Messages Composed in WORD?
by Raymond Mills
Microsoft has kindly given us the ability to send mail from MS-WORD--either directly or through Outlook. Yet, many people sending Word-based messages wonder why the recipients receive the messages with characters replaced with boxes. Typically it happens to quotation marks and apostrophes.     The problem is related to an advanced feature of Word called auto-formatting, where MS-WORD substitutes fancy looking marks (that look like 9s and 6s) for the quote marks and apostrophes. These characters are not part of the standard ASCII alphabet. So recipients who don't have Outlook don't see the fancy characters. Instead they see a small box character. (Like this [] - ed)	To get rid of this nuisance, you'll need to turn off Autoformat in WORD. To do this, bring up WORD and click on [Tools]/[Auto Correct Options] Then, click on the [AutoFormat] tab. Remove the check next to "Straight Quotes" with "Smart Quotes". Now, click on the [AutoFormat As You Type] tab. Remove the check here too.     From this point forward, your WORD documents won't have those nice fancy quotation marks. But they'll mail better. It's a trade-off.
Number 236 - January 2003