WD97: Field Code Becomes Damaged Under Certain Circumstances

When your document contains a damaged field code and you save the document in Rich Text Format (RTF), you may receive the following error message: When you click Details, you receive the following message: Other possible symptoms include:

• If you click Header and Footer on the View menu, the header and footer panes may not be displayed.
• Field codes have only one field brace displayed instead of two.
• If you delete the text in the header or footer, Word may stop responding.

This problem can occur in a variety of situations when manually editing fields in the header including, but not limited to, some of the following actions:

• On the Standard toolbar, Show/Hide is not selected, that is, nonprinting characters are not displayed.
• On the View tab in the Options dialog box, the View Field Codes check box is cleared.
• On the Layout tab in the Page Setup dialog box, the Different First Page check box is cleared.
• You save, close, and then reopen the file.
• You press TAB and then press BACKSPACE in the header or footer.

To correct this problem, install Microsoft Word 97 Service Release 1 (SR- 1).

To work around this problem, copy everything but the last paragraph to a new document. To do this, follow these steps:

1. Open the document that contains the damaged field code.
2. Press CTRL+END to move the insertion point to the end of the document.
3. Press CTRL+SHIFT+HOME to select all but the last paragraph of the document.
4. On the Edit menu, click Copy.
5. Create a new document.
6. On the Edit menu, click Paste.
7. Re-create the header and footer for the document.

Microsoft has confirmed this to be a problem in Microsoft Word 97 for Windows. This problem was corrected in Microsoft Word 97 SR-1.

For additional information about SR-1, please see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

For more information about troubleshooting damaged documents, please see the following articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: Or, click the Office Assistant, type "troubleshooting corrupt documents" (without the quotation marks), click Search, and then click the "Prevent loss of work and recover lost documents" topic.

NOTE: If the Assistant is hidden, click the Office Assistant button on the Standard toolbar. If Word Help is not installed on your computer, please see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: