Why all these dots instead of the spaces that were there & ¶ marks when I Reply to or Forward an email in my new Outlook in Office 2019 Pro+?

Jeff

I am sorry. But I feel you would be best served by direct support from Microsoft.

Because:

1. I can't reproduce the problem in my environment, so I can't test for possible causes or confidently provide the steps for a fix. i.e. I'm working blind.
2. The Reddit article is the only thing I have found with a confirmed solution and that involved working directly with Microsoft Support to uninstall Office, remove the current profile (including the registry entries) and rebuilding everything from scratch.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Office365/comments/tranah/outlook_paragraph_symbol_keeps_coming_back/

I was able to resolve the issue with the help of Microsoft support. The step that seemed to be needed to start over from scratch with this particular Outlook settings was: Go into regedit and browse to: HKEY_Current_User\SOFTWARE\Microsoft and then rename Office folder to Office.old Upon reinstalling office after that, it then defaulted back to default fonts etc, and also got rid of the issue with the "Show all formatting marks" check box getting checked again when replying to emails.

This is not something I feel comfortable recommending you try on your own, nor do I feel confident in my ability to help you out if something goes sideways.

Thanks for all your help. I'm a little tempted to try that regedit but as you said, I should probably ask Microsoft Support for help.

Wish me luck. I need some. 😋

Hornblower, how do I get thru to a person at that Microsoft Tech Support site to help me? Everything that I’ve tried typing in at https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/home/contact after picking one of the related Products like Windows or , just wants to give me a link to Get Community Help which brings me here to Microsoft Answers.

There must be a trick. Hopefully you know what it is?

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![Image](https://learn-attachment.microsoft.com/api/attachments/67b99d70-aa67-4ca9-9d33-6584b4a5aa01?platform=QnA

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https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/customer-service-phone-numbers-c0389ade-5640-e588-8b0e-28de8afeb3f2

I'm still struggling. That link does not work for me, as it should. I click on Home Users and it goes to that same site I've seen recently that is a dead end. BUT, if I happen to hover my mouse in the right places, a grey box pops saying [Contact - Microsoft Support]. The problem is, it's not clickable and it just disappears no matter where on it or near it that I click. Heck, I even tried right-clicking near it and scanning thru "View Page Source", hoping I'd see the URL that that was supposed to be linked to. But, I couldn't find anything that made sense.

Maybe my EDGE browser is messing with me if you say that yours works fine?
Here's when I click on your link:

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Then I see this after clicking on [ Get Help ]:

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