Office 2004 Word 11.5.5 formatting weirdness

I'm using Microsoft Office 2004 Word 11.5.5 on an Intel MacBook running OS X 10.4.11. I'm having troubles with formatting.

If I select one section of the text and try to apply formatting to it, the formatting is applied to the entire document. For example, if I want to center a title, I highlight it and center it and the entire rest of the document becomes centered. If I then hit "undo" it will usually return the rest of the document to left justified. If I highlight a section and then change the spacing on it, it changes the spacing on the entire document. If I try to add bullets to one section, it adds bullets to the entire document.

I have been using Word for years and am usually quite skilled at formatting (I even had a job working for a professor formatting all his students' papers for publication in a book) so I don't think this is user error.

I was wondering if perhaps my files were corrupt (although it seems to happen on almost every file), so I created a new clean file (by saving my doc as a webpage and then back to a doc) but the formatting issues persisted.

Has anyone else had these type of problems? Any ideas on how to fix it? I've checked the "edit" tab in Word "preferences" and don't see anything obvious there.

I appreciate your help!

You may have a corrupt "normal template". Move the "normal.dotm" to your desktop and restart Word 2004. Word will create a new normal template. Let's see if that fixes it. I can't think of anything that might cause it.

Regards.

Thank you for the suggestion. I moved Normal to my desktop and restarted Word. Word did create a new Normal template.

The formatting issues, however, continue.

It remains a mystery...

actually, i think that did fix it...thank you!

once i did the save as webpage and then back to word doc, and then created a new file, the formatting issues were gone.

this is SO great. thank you! (my dissertation is due on friday

Glad to hear it. On occasion the normal template becomes so filled with changes or macros that it can easily become corrupt. Good luck with your dissertation.

Regards.