A strange problem has developed with my Word program. It is not life threatening only most annoying. To insert double quotation marks (”) you press shift plus (’). This used to work but a few weeks ago it ceased to work correctly and changed to a thick vertical line. Can you suggest why this has happened and what can be done to put it right short of re-installing the whole program? It prints as the screen shows ie. it is not a display problem. Also my other programs like Eudora and Works do not show this fault so it is clearly in the Word program. I recall that earlier versions of Word gave some options as to how quotation marks were displayed but I can find no options in Word 97 nor can I find any symbol like the one that appears anywhere else.

This may be a problem with smart quotes. Smart quotes is a feature that turns normal straight quotation marks into curly quotation marks. I would disable these and see if it makes a difference. Go to the ‘Tools’ menu > ‘Auto Correct’, and click on the ‘AutoFormat As You Type’ tab. Under the ‘Replace as you type’ heading, untick the box next to ‘Replace ‘Straight Quotes’ with ‘Smart Quotes’. This will make Word default back to normal quotation marks. If this fails, you could always try (even though it is a long shot) downloading the Microsoft Office Service Patch which might remove any bug that is causing the quotation marks to display and print as you have described. As a final resort I suggest that you reinstall Word. Although this may be a hassle to do, it almost certainly should fix the problem.