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Hello to all. A fellow tech writer and I are about to pull our hair out
and, surprise, surprise, it's because of a graphics problem in Word. I
know, Word is awful when it comes to graphics. But we don't need a heavy
duty application - the document we are creating is very informal and
only for internal distribution within a small team. We are just looking
for an easy, quick way to communicate some information. The document
needs to contain several screenshots and quite a bit of text. I have
used Word for this type of document several times in the past, and I've
never encountered this problem. A search of the techwr-l archives,
Microsoft's support site, and the Word MVP site turned up a few
suggestions but none of them have worked. I swear I've heard of this
issue somewhere recently, but I'm at a loss.
The problem is that the screenshots display intermittently. When I first
insert a screenshot, it usually displays. If I do something to change
the state of my screen (such as opening a second Word document, opening
Word help, switching between Normal and Print Layout view, switching to
another application), the screenshot no longer displays. If I then click
in the area where I inserted the screenshot, a box displays so that I
know Word knows there is something there but the box is empty. This
display issue happens no matter how I insert or paste the graphic. On my
computer, I can usually make the screenshot display consistently by
saving the file, closing it, and reopening it. But this does not help on
the other tech writer's computer - the screenshot does not display
consistently on her computer, no matter what we try.
We are both running Word 2003 on XP.
Solutions we have tried include: installing SP2 for Office 2003,
selecting/clearing one-by-one all drawing and image check boxes in the
Tools -> Options window, and experimenting with Paste Special.
At first, we thought the behavior was due to some setting in Word. But
now, the behavior is so wonky, I'm starting to wonder if it's a bug.
We can workaround the problem by creating the "document" in some other
make-do application (like PowerPoint), but it's an incredibly irritating
problem that I'd like to solve.
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