Ever opened a Word document and found that all the Chinese characters had turned into random symbols, while the English text looked perfectly fine?
That was an issue I ran into recently.
Interestingly, when another colleague opened the same document, everything looked normal. The document also displayed correctly in Word for the web.
What I tried first
My first thought was a Unicode or system locale issue. I tried changing the system locale to Chinese (Singapore) and enabling the UTF-8 option, but neither worked.
I then tried a workaround in Word. I selected all the text, opened the Font dialogue, and changed the Asian text font to 宋体 (SimSun) while keeping the Latin text font as Times New Roman. The Chinese characters displayed correctly again.
Problem solved, right? Not quite.
The next day, the same issue came back when the user opened another Word document.
What actually fixed it
This time, I decided to try repairing Microsoft Office. I ran an Online Repair, and that finally resolved the issue.
Looking back, I probably should have tried repairing Office earlier. But troubleshooting doesn't always follow a straight path. Sometimes, an apparent font or encoding issue requires you to look beyond the document itself.
Takeaway
A workaround can get the user back to work, but if the problem returns, it's worth revisiting your assumptions and investigating the application installation itself.
Originally shared on LinkedIn.