Word 2010 randomly deleting spaces between words

Anonymous
2010-06-23T08:01:44+00:00

Continuing discussion from this thread. Original problem is quoted below:

I have no printers of any type installed on my system (and haven't had in the past on this install of Windows 7 64-bit, so there's nothing to clean out). My system is thoroughly maintained (I run a site called TweakGuides.com - I know how to keep a Windows system in tip-top condition).

I've also disabled a range of options in Word to ensure that basic documents remain as basic documents, free of smart tags and other unnecessary embedded data. I even disable all autocorrect functions as a matter of course.

I still find that any document I create in Word 2010 will display randomly missing spaces when viewed in Word 2007. It makes no difference if I save the document with compatibility mode on or off, the spaces will repeatedly disappear. If I view the document using Windows Wordpad, I can see that the spaces haven't actually been deleted, so it seems to be a Word 2007-specific issue.

As such, I'm convinced it's a compatibility bug, as within Word 2010 itself these space deletions never appear, only when viewed or edited in Word 2007. This is fairly serious as you can imagine, because it means documents I send to people using Office 2007 (a large proportion of Word users) look sloppy as a result. Editing them is also pointless because as soon as they're saved in Word 2010 and sent back, a similar number of random spaces are deleted.

Now continuing with reply to the suggested answers from the previous thread:

@TerFar - I understand what you're saying, however obviously Word does not need a specific printer driver, or comes with a generic one built-in, or uses a Windows-based generic driver, because I don't have a printer and have never attached one to my system(s), nor installed any such driver - not even a virtual printer like Adobe Acrobat - on this current installation of Windows 7. In fact I have my Print Spooler service set to Disabled because of this.

I haven't had any problems running and using the full functionality of Word 2003, 2007 and now 2010. In Word 2010 under the Print tab it just says No Printer. Selecting it, or selecting a print function anywhere in Windows takes me to a prompt to set up a printer, which I cancel. So there is no explicit third party printer driver installed on this system, of that I am certain. Hence the bug may even be with the generic Office print device.

@Doug - thanks for the offer, however the documents in question vary and the one causing the problem right now is a 300+ page book which I'm loathe to share. I have however seen it with a shorter document of around 20 pages which I and another person with Word 2007 were editing back and forth recently for a project (again not open for sharing). Every time I'd fix it up and save it in Word 2010, send it to him, he'd note that spaces were being deleted, and either he or I would fix it, and it would occur again. I'll create a brief two-page document, save it and send it to you instead to hopefully demonstrate it.

Right now I've installed Word 2007 alongside Word 2010 and I'm going to play around to see if I can figure precisely what is causing them. This is the first major bug I've run across which I can't really get a decent workaround for. I'd prefer not to have to switch back to Word 2007, but it may be necessary if this bug is not resolved in Word 2010 in one form or another.

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Anonymous
2011-02-24T06:13:51+00:00

I am a Microsoft employee, I lead the Program Management team for Office Sustaining Engineering.

This is a known issue with Word 2007.

The issue has already been addressed in a release that first appeared on September 25, 2008. The "non-security fixes" section of the article describes the behavior. The knowledge base article and solution for the problem are located under the link. For Office 2007 users who will receive your documents, ensure they are current on updates for Office. Specifically, ensure the patch referenced in the link above is installed, or ensure the user of 2007 has installed Office 2007 Service Pack 2.

The easiest way to obtain the fix is to install Office 2007 Service Pack 2.

This is an issue related to opening files that we discovered and fixed before the shipment of Office 2010. It was important enough for us to push the fix through the security update channel. At Microsoft we were able to re-produce the problem on machines which did not have the patch installed for Office 2007, and we are unable to reproduce the problem on machines that have the patch installed.

Yesterday we re-tested this problem based on the information being reported in the forums and on various blogs. There are a few details worth noting:

  • If you have already saved the document in an unpatched version of Word and the spaces are missing, unfortunately there is no way to recover them.
  • When you send the file to other users from Office 2010, unpatched 2007 users who edit the document may cause the spaces to disappear. It is important to ensure Office 2007 users are patched with this update, and ensuring that can be done by turning on Automatic Updates.

Related to the forum post on this topic:

  • In our testing, turning spooling services on and off did not affect the problem.
  • Additionally, the presence (or not) of a specific printer driver or any printer driver did not solve or cause the problem.

As has been reported on various blogs, the Open XML standard is not the cause of the issue. This is an issue with Word 2007, and we believe a solution has been available since 2008.

We certainly regret any inconvenience this issue may have caused.

If you patch your 2007 installation to the current update level, and you are authoring documents on patched versions of Word 2007 (or 2010), and you still experience this problem, please don't hesitate to contact us.

This is our team blog: http://blogs.technet.com/b/office\_sustained\_engineering/.

This is our Twitter stream: http://twitter.com/officeUpdates

You can send feedback or requests for help regarding files that submit this behavior (for patched versions of Word) via the email link on my blog:http://blogs.technet.com/gray\_knowlton. We are very interested to know if users are still experiencing this problem after systems are patched.

Regards,

Gray Knowlton

Group Program Manager

Office Customer and Partner Engineering Services

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  1. Anonymous
    2010-06-24T05:33:50+00:00

    OK, after some more testing, I believe I've solved the problem, but it's slightly confusing.

    The problem does indeed relate to Word 2010's requirement for a printer device. The default XPS Document Writer in Windows 7 should suffice, and I already had this installed on my system. However this is where things get confusing. Both the XPS Document Writer and more recently the Acrobat 9 printer device installed did not resolve the issue - I still saw randomly dropped spaces in Word 2010 documents when viewed in Word 2007 on the same system.

    However it turns out that since I had disabled the Print Spooler service, this causes Word 2010 to not detect the XPS Document Writer and hence say there is no printer, as shown inthis screenshot . In all previous versions of Word which I've used, disabling Print Spooler has never caused any problems, it simply disables printing functionality for physical and virtual printers and I manually enable it as required.

    In any case, if a document is saved in Word 2010 without a printer device, it remains glitchy and will continue to show this problem, even when a print device (and the Print Spooler service) are enabled. I use a lot of pre-made templates and documents, and these seem to have been corrupted by Word 2010 in this manner. I've fixed them now by converting them to .DOC format then back again to .DOCX in Word 2007.

    Side-by-side testing of Word 2007 and Word 2010 shows that with Print Spooler enabled, and with a fresh document (i.e. blank new documents) in Word 2010, the glitch does not occur when the document is opened in Word 2007.

    The moral of the story is that Print Spooler needs to remain as an Automatic service; even Manual is not sufficient. As I say, this problem never occurred with previous versions of Word even with Print Spooler disabled, so it's fairly clear that Word 2010 ABSOLUTELY REQUIRES not only a printer device but the print-related service running at all times. I'll mark TerFar's answer as being correct, although Terry for future reference I suggest that you get in the habit of talking about a 'printing device' rather than just repeatedly saying 'install a 'printer driver', because it confuses people into thinking you're referring to a third party print driver; the XPS Document Writer for example is a device (virtual printer), and not just a driver, nor is it something people can easily install. For those reading this unaware of how to enable/disable XPS Document Writer, it can be found under Windows Control Panel>Programs and Features>Turn Windows Features on or off> XPS Services.

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  2. Doug Robbins - MVP - Office Apps and Services 323.6K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2010-06-23T21:37:37+00:00

    Koroush sent the document do me and it displayed perfectly in Word 2007 here.  I suspect that he has an issue with the graphics driver or a mismatch between the graphics driver and the Printer Driver.

    Also, he advised that he had not tried printing the document from Word 2007 to see if the printed result exhibited the problem.

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  3. Anonymous
    2010-06-23T18:00:34+00:00

    The XPS doc writer is fine as is the PDF 'printer' driver as all do the same thing.

    And the answer to the second part is YES. Word needs a printer driver to work correctly even if it is one of those mentioned above.

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  4. Anonymous
    2010-06-23T14:00:49+00:00

    I'm not doubting your expertise, but you seem to miss the point that I have not altered anything in this regard. I didn't uninstall any printer drivers or "fiddle" to make this happen. Word 2007 worked absolutely fine on my system. I then install Word 2010, only alter a few options within Word to remove things like autocorrect and smart tags, and soon find that Word 2010 is now randomly showing dropped spaces when the document is viewed in Word 2007.

    Furthermore, Windows 7 does have a default printer driver installed: the XPS Document Writer. With or without this device, with or without another similar device like Acrobat 9, the fault still occurs.

    Are you suggesting I randomly install a driver for a non-existent printer on my machine? Are you suggesting that Word was only designed to be used on systems with printers?

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