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Apostrophe showing up as superscript "1" in Mail Merge...HELP

Anonymous
2013-04-25T14:08:13+00:00

Office for Mac 2011

I'm doing a mail merge from a template in Word that outputs to an HTML e-mail in Outlook.  The process is working very well except that any apostrophes in the Word doc are showing up as a superscript number 1.  I've tried to remove a few of the contractions but the nature of the letter (somewhat casual format business communication) just sounds better with a few contractions.

I suspect this is a bug, but if anyone knows a workaround I would be grateful!!

Thanks!

Microsoft 365 and Office | Word | For home | Windows

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  1. Anonymous
    2014-09-04T08:50:06+00:00

    Let me go out on a limb here and suggest that the key issue is that mail-merge transfers only ASCII.

    Word uses high-order characters for things like quotes and apostrophes, so it can produce "curly quotes".

    These characters occur in the high-order character-set, way above the range mail merge can transfer (it's a design defect...).  For example, the apostrophe in Word is character number 8,217. ASCII tops out at 256.

    One possible solution is to go to Word>Preferences>Autocorrect>Auto format as you type and switch OFF "Replace as you type: "Straight quotation marks with  "smart quotation marks"".

    If you do that, Word will use ASCII quotes (the apostrophe becomes character 39) which will transfer in mail merge.

    You can do this after you create the document.

    1. Go to Word>Preferences>Autocorrect>Auto format as you type and switch OFF "Replace as you type: "Straight quotation marks with  "smart quotation marks""
    2. Open Find and Replace.
    3. Type a single apostrophe in the Find box and in the Replace box.
    4. Replace All.

    Because you have switched OFF "Replace as you type: "Straight quotation marks with  "smart quotation marks"" Word will instantly replace all the curly apostrophes in the document (character number 8217) with straight ones (character 39).

    Switch the smart quotes back on after you finish your mail merge.

    Hope this helps

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  1. Bob Jones AKA CyberTaz MVP 434K Reputation points
    2013-04-26T20:56:24+00:00

    This may very well be a font-related issue. Try the procedure described here to clean up the fonts installed on your Mac: **Font Weeding.**

    Depending on your version of OS X the Font Book app may be a bit different but the routine is basically the same.

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  2. Anonymous
    2013-04-26T18:09:10+00:00

    Ok - here's the solution, and it's a typically useless and frustrating one...

    ...use a windows PC if you want merge from MS Word to MS Outlook, at least if you don't want a scattering of random superscript 1's!

    I switched to my colleague's PC and it worked immediately, so it seems like a classic Apple vs Microsoft issue.

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  3. Anonymous
    2013-04-26T17:20:02+00:00

    I've had the same issue - it's very frustrating!

    I tried changing to true-type fonts like Arial or Courier New, with no luck... although it did work once, randomly, but not since.

    Desperately trying to get this done before I leave work for the weekend (nearly 90 minutes late already).

    Any ideas?

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  4. Anonymous
    2013-04-26T08:53:13+00:00

    Do you face this similar issue with other documents which also has Apostrophe symbol????

    Or the issue only resides only with this specific document????

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