The Invisible Pictures of MS Word

Today, a user complained that she cannot see some of the pictures in her MS Word document. She had tried all the different layout but still can’t see those pictures but she can see those pictures when she did a print preview. She sent the same MS Word document to her colleagues and they have no problem.

I remote into her computer using Desktop Authority and started troubleshooting. I opened up the MS Word document and true enough, some pictures only showed {EMBED Word.Picture.8} or {EMBED Excel.Sheet.8}.

First I made sure the document is in Print Layout and checked on the following View Options:
Tools Options View Show Picture placeholders was unchecked.
Tools Options View Print and Web Layout options Drawings was checked.
File Print Options Include with document Drawing objects was checked.

After verifying all options were correct, we still cannot see those pictures. Then she pointed out that a mailto:emailaddress will become {HYPERLINK ….} and the page number at the footer also looks strange. So, this is something to do with field codes and pressing Alt-F9 did the job by hiding the field codes.

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