I would appreciate your help with my frustrating problem. I run Windows 95 with Word 97 on a Fairstar computer. I have for some time kept a folder with a number of files detailing my financial affairs - tax, investments etc. Until recently this worked without a hitch but now when I bring the files up the screen is disordered, the columns are not columnar and the font is not correct. However when I go to Print Preview all is as it should be. I would like to avoid retyping the lot in the proper form and so would be glad if you tell me what I did wrong to cause this trouble ane advise of corrective action.

I have been experimenting with your problem which is why I have taken a while to respond (for which I apologise). I have found that probably the only way to solve your problem is to work it through. If it looks ok when you go to ‘Print Preview’ and when you print it out, we can deduce that it is a problem with the Word 97 ‘Editor’ (which is one way to express the part of the Word 97 application which allows you to edit documents). I suggest that now you open the document with ‘WordPad’ which is a default application included with Windows 95 and/or AbiWord which is another free word processor capable of opening *.doc files (you can download it from www.abiword.com). I would suggest you download AbiWord (since it is less than 1mb and does the format quite well) and open the document in AbiWord , then open the document in another application (ie. WordPad or AbiWord) and see how it displays. If it displays correctly, we have narrowed down the problem to Word 97. In this instance, I suggest that you reinstall Word 97 which should fix the problem. However, if it still displays incorrectly in the application which you opened, yet print previews and prints correctly, it is probably a problem with the document file. In this unlikely, yet still possible situation, the remedy is to retype the document. Try a small test run first to see how it goes.Please feel free to contact me again if you still cannot fix this problem.