After download of Mav, MS Word for Office for Mac 2011 comes up blank.

Question

After download of Mav, MS Word for Office for Mac 2011 comes up blank. Other MS Office apps work fine. When restarting iMac in Safe mode, Word opens OK. Apple support rep says, "Not our problem; it's Microsoft's. There are no Microsoft experts here." But it was Maverick that knocked Word out. (Note: the "not our problem" quote is from the third contact with Apple support. The first two support techs tried to resolve the problem, were very accommodating, and tried their best to solve the issue.)
On another note, I use a Microsoft wireless keyboard, with push-button shortcuts to mail, Safari, etc. The keyboard Command + keystroke shortcuts no longer work, and in the System Preferences file the message tells me it can't access them.
Any suggestions, especially for the former problem, would be appreciated.

Answer 1

DHodges wrote:
Thanks; this last reply came closest to 'solving' the issue. While I selected font sub, it at first had no affect on the document.
I then went back to prefs and set the compatability dropdown from 'Custom' (where it had defaulted) to 'Word 2004-2007', assuming these docs were created from a recent past Windows.
I 'Saved As' a Word for Mac " .docm "
Whoa... the extensions mean something. Your original problem (document shows bold, italic, underline, but tables and other complex formatting are lost) sounds as though the document was being exported as a .RTF, a Rich Text Format file. If you save as a .DOCM, that's a Word Macro Enabled Document. Regular Word 2007, 2008, 2010 and 2011 docs are .DOCX. Regular Word 97 through 2004 docs are .DOC. You need to save that document as a .DOCX or a .DOC or you're gonna have problems later.
- and the documents appear normal (though I had to switch one to 'Portrait' as it for some reason wanted to display in landsacpe.
Normally you'd have to select page orientation.
So, poor testing on my part. I have no idea which of the above steps fixed it but I'm guessing the 'Save As' to my version of Word.
If so, it would appear the 'Compatability' feature was not working at least on these two documents.
Word's compatibility feature is supposed to ensure that a document you produce is compatible with the target version of Word. If you turn the compatibility stuff on then you will be warned if you are using Word 2007 through 2011 and you use a feature that earlier versions of Word do not have. Microsoft shipped a translator which works with Office 2003 and 2004 and which allows Word 2003 or 2004 to read Word 2007, 2008, 2010, or 2011 documents (.DOCX) and to save them as Word 97 through 2004 documents (.DOC) _as long as they don't have any incompatible features_. Word's compatibility features doesn't do much for .RTFs or for .DOCMs.