Of course, it might be just easier to place the DOC into InDesign and edit from there, but this isn’t necessarily about the easiest route.

oh and my coffee maker broke last week.

so you have my sympathy

NeoOffice also helps when you open a file with Macros in it you’re too scared to run (that doesn’t take “no” gracefully”).

It’s free too so makes a great backup.

I’d second the idea of completely eliminating the normal.dot file so it generates a new one though.

I’m amazed how little I actually need to format my day to day communications these days though. Hooray for plain text!

Update at 10:11 AM:

Darn it, iLike on Facebook is not updating.

My playlist showed up on Facebook this morning after I refreshed the cache per your suggested technique. But none of the music I’ve played this morning has yet shown up on my Facebook Profile. It still shows only the tracks I played last night.

Do I have to manually refresh the cache several times a day to force the list to update? If so, there’s still a bug in the code. (If it helps you debug: my last play was around 8:00 AM this morning. As of 10:00 AM, the list had not yet updated. I’ll keep playing music, and watch for your reply.)

Update 10:39 AM ET (7:39 AM PT)

Restored playlist still does not update. Have played over a dozen tracks since manually refreshing cache to restore playlist to Facebook Profile. Looks like I will have to manually refresh cache every hour or so if I want the playlist to show any recent history! So I’d say you’ve tracked down much of the bug, but there is still something that prevents the playlist from updating. :(

10:45 AM ET

And when I manually update again, the playlist refreshes. So there it is. The playlist is dead and does not auto-refresh without manual user intervention. So that’s the last bit that I imagine you’ll want to fix. Thanks in advance.

11:28 AM ET

Manually refreshed cache a third time at 11:28 AM ET and in that way forced playlist in Facebook to update. Playlist in Facebook simply does not auto-update.

4:46 PM ET

Manually refreshed cache once again at 4:46 pm ET, causing list to update. List does not update unless I manually refresh the cache.

Pissed me off too, when I found out for myself.

“I post this notice on my door for each accustomed visitor: I am gone into the fields, to take what this sweet hour yields”

I assume you have tried copying the text out of it and into a new document. I have done that before when something has happened that makes no sense and it then works fine.

Sure. And saving with a new name. Those things did not help. The really tough part is, halfway through a very long and rather important document, I lost all structural formatting. Bolds are still bold, and Verdana is still Verdana, but all levels of subheading, all lists, and all body text are now “Normal.”

It’s as if a structured, semantic HTML document were to be replaced with FONT tags and BR tags.

It matters because, when the writing is done, the document will be imported into InDesign. And importing without styles will create tons of unnecessary work.

I’m thinking the updating of the Normal template caused this grief, and am trying various workarounds now, including one suggested here, for which I am grateful.

It’s odd to me that Word, Twitter, and iLike in Facebook would all freak out on the same morning, but it might be someone’s way of telling me to take a break.

I have Office X, so my Normal file is in “/Applications/Microsoft Office X/Templates”. Yours would probably be in a similar location.