I scan medical records on my computer using a optical scanner which saves the material as a .doc. I save these documents on my computer and copy sections to be printed. When I open these scanned records, many become corrupted. Not really knowing what to do about it (and too lazy to rescan), I've copied the parts I needed and pasted on a new blank document. Strangely, they always copy and paste correctly. Windows keeps telling me that a 'table' is corrupted, but I just ignore it. If you could get the document open, I would try copying it to a blank document. It works for me. Jane

I have been working at finding away to change the default font on all documents since this thread started. No matter what I clicked on the starter version came up so I thought that might be my problem. I finally uninstalled MS Office Starter and MS Office Student and Home, then just reinstalled the student and home. I still could not get the font style to stay at what I set it. I thought about what was said about the 2003 version and opened a blank page, set the font and single space, went to file and chose "save as". A menu came up and I chose to saveto my desktop as MS Word 97-2003 Template (.dot) and made a shortcut, so far it has held. In case some else is still having this problem I am posting my results. None of the other ways worked for me, a new document always came up with Office's default settings.

Microsoft's main market for Office is employers, public and private sector. The historical investment most places have made in things like forms, macro-driven apps, interfaces with other systems, etc., as well as what happens as new hires come in, make it much cheaper to continue with widely used MS software. Software license costs are small change compared to infrastructure and support expenses. For employers of any size, the fees paid for Office are a small fraction of the retail price an individual would face. For individuals, a free choice should serve most purposes. For a workplace other than very small, or an employee of a fair sized place who wants work compatibility in using a personal machine, MS is most frequently the choice.

Another 2 cent contribution: The overall looks of the Tutorial appears to me to have the margins equal, rather than all of the text justified. If all of the lines of text were center-justified both the left and right sides of the page would have jagged edges since all of the words on a line have a different combined number of letters. A simple example: The word two is of course 3 letters whereas the word three has 5. If each of these was on a different line and center-justified, both sides would be jagged so long as the margins were equal. But in order to get nearly every line of equal length, you would have to resort to hyphenating some words at the end of a line that did not exactly match the margins that have been set -- as is done with some newspaper editing. Not all of their lines are exact but come within reason, choosing to hyphenate only the longer words. The Tutorial example "Adding Flush Space" is an illustration of the process used by the newspapers.