Word 2010 randomly deleting spaces between words

Anonymous

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

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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99 additional answers

Anonymous

2010-11-09T10:58:37+00:00

Heh. Oops, wrong button. I hit the "Propose an Answer" by accident on Charles's post. Anyway, I did some digging around and when I came here I saw his post. He's pretty close. Anyway...

It's a problem with Word 2007. The missing spaces issue occurs when a Word 2007 user opens up a docx file that was created either in Word 2008 (i.e. the Mac version) or Word 2010. The problem is that Word 2007 does not process the docx XML correctly.

Here's the culprit: <w:t xml:space="preserve"> </w:t>

You see that little space right before </w:t>? Well Word 2007 doesn't see it. And that's where the problem begins.

Quick, half-assed workaround, by the way. Rename the Docx file to ZIP. Use Notepad to open the document.xml file that's located in the "word" directory (which you just unzipped from the docx file). Press Ctrl + H in Notepad to open up the Replace dialogue.

Replace all mention of <w:t xml:space="preserve"> </w:t>

with <w:t xml:space="preserve">_</w:t>

Only replace the _ with the special space character that you can type by holding down Alt and pressing 255 on the Numpad.

Save it. Zip all the files up, rename the zip file back to the docx extension, and open the document back up. It should be good to go.
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Anonymous

2010-11-08T15:22:42+00:00

I am seeing this problem opening a .docx file (last edited in Word 2010) in Word 2007, on Windows 7 64-bit, with a local printer driver installed and defaulted, and the spooling service set to automatic. I am also seeing this problem opening the same file in Word 2007, on Windowx XP 32-bit, with a local printer driver installed and defaulted, and the spooling service set to automatic. I think there is more to this problem than simply these two factors.

On another Windows XP 32-bit PC, on the other hand, I do not see the problem. That machine has a local printer driver installed, but a network printer is the default, and the spooling service set to automatic. Opening the same file, the spaces are intact. Re-saving the document on this machine fixes the problem for the other two, so that is my workaround solution to the problem.

I suspect that the problem may have to do with the XML and some difference in the way something is handled (in the creation of that XML) between 2010 and 2007. To explore this a little further, I opened up the raw "document.xml" files buried in the .docx files (you can do this at home by changing the file name to .zip). I compared the 2010-saved version with "deleted spaces" and the same document re-saved in 2007 (on the PC that read it properly). I notice that the World 2010 has a lot of additional items in the XML header. I also noticed that the "settings.xml" file has some different headers as well.

Exploring the body text a bit, I notice that all of my deleted spaces correspond to a <w:t xml:space="preserve"> tag. However, this tag does not predict where a deleted space would occur, as many of these in the XML would correctly appear as spaces in Word. There is no difference in the XML body between the two (2010-saved and 2007-saved) file versions. That is, the same exact XML body displays differently in the 2010-saved file and the 2007-saved file. I suspect that there is an XML setting being inserted by Word 2010 that affects how this <w:t xml:space="preserve"> tag is interpreted... but it only occurs on certain machines.

I would be inclined to call this a bug, but whether the bug occurs in Word 2010 or Word 2007 is unclear. I note that in opening the document in OpenOffice (on the Win 7 PC) the spaces are still deleted. Unfortunately, I do not have the administrator rights to install OO on the "good" Win XP machine to see if the spaces are still there. In any case, it doesn't seem acceptable that a document should have any probability of failure between Office 2010 and Office 2007 in the same .docx format on any two machines, regardless of their printer setup.
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Anonymous

2010-10-15T21:26:27+00:00

Word interrogates the printer driver parameters so as to be able to layout the document as accurately as it will be printed onto paper. If the printer driver is not fully compliant or compatible or Word is unable to see it correctly, then it cannot lay out the page correctly.

All the users that have reported the problems so far are either using Networked printers or are working remotely over VPN (or similar). Those with local printers connect don’t seem to have the problem.

You're just plain wrong about this problem. Since you're not experiencing the problem and are unable to replicate it, I think you should desist with the single solution you keep harping on (which is not, by the way, working for a single person). As to your other solutions regarding justifying text, you need to understand that this is NOT a layout problem. It is a problem of Word deleting spaces. Justifying the text does not solve the problem.

And just so we're clear, I have 5 different LOCAL printers installed, I have this problem at home and at work, and it is RANDOM. In fact, it has not been a problem for a few months until today.

I experience this problem in Word 2007 with files loaded from Skydrive. It is extremely frustrating since I'm using Skydrive for my dissertation. The really irritating thing about it is that spell check and grammar check don't find the words that are run together. They must be corrected (that is, spaces must be inserted) manually.
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Anonymous

2010-09-28T21:22:10+00:00

I have no idea whether Microsoft is pursuing this one or not. Frankly, if they are, they probably already know the cause of the problem and nothing we do will actually help.

But just in case, do you, or does anyone following this conversation, have "before & after" .docx files they could post somewhere? or failing that, could someone post the "before & after" .xml code from around an affected paragraph in a message here? At the very least, someone here may be able to pass on a concrete piece of evidence. I'm quite happy to have a look at the XML, but I don't really want to spend much time trying to generate it when there seem to be plenty of good examples out there already.

Peter Jamieson
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