Pages document turned to gibberish-strange characters in rectangles. Can't read underlying text (still there)

I use a Pages document (password protected) as a frequent reference. It is 22 pages of text. Suddenly most text was replaced with strange characters, each encased in a little rectangle, so document was unreadable. Selecting a section of text, I could right-click and see that underlying text was still there, just not readable onscreen. Style was "Normal*." I don't know what the " * " means. I selected all and changed style to "Heading 9" on the list. All text reappeared, so my data is ok - for now (though not formatted as I want it). I can't trust Pages, however, and don't know what caused the problem or how to avoid it.
Note that the style now shows "Heading 9*". I don't know why the " * ". I tried selecting all and making "Normal" the global style, but the strange characters wouldn't budge. Switching back to Normal brings back gibberish.
Some text is Verdana; I just noticed that changing font also got rid of gibberish. Changing back to Verdana brought back gibberish.
Note that not every line of text was changed to gibberish; some were just fine.
Other Pages documents are fine - right now. I notice that there are asterisks in Style in other text documents.
I'm an experienced computer user, new to Pages in the fall when it came with my MacBook Air. In this document, format isn't all that important, but I can imagine where this would be a huge disaster for other types of documents.
Any help in figuring out what's going on most appreciated.

Tom -
"That sounds like Apple's Last Resort font, which gets used when for some reason the app forgets about the font being used. Use Fontbook to make sure you don't have duplicate Verdanas on your machine. Also try cleaning your font caches with Onyx or by doing a safe boot"
Wow! Who would have guessed! Thank you for the advice; Fontbook revealed a number of duplicate fonts - ot Verdana, interestingly enough - which I have now resolved. I then switched all text to Trebuchet MS, and everything reverted to normal. I can live with Trebuchet.
This problem appeared on the same day (before or after I wasn't sure) I installed MS Office. Could this have caused the problem?
Thanks for your prompt reply, explanation and solutions.

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