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Text in brackets is displayed in a Microsoft Office Word document instead of an image, hyperlink, embedded object, or some other content

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Field codes in Microsoft Office Word can be scary if you don't know what they are.
 
Imagine you open a Word document that includes an Excel worksheet. When you open the document, you expect to see cells and data from the Excel worksheet displayed in the document.

But imagine if you opened the document and instead of the Excel worksheet, you simply see { EMBED Excel.Sheet.12 }
 
What happened?
 
It's possible to accidentally display the field codes in a document instead of the field code results. In other words, it's possible to display the placeholders for content instead of the content itself.
 
You might accidentally display field codes in a document if you press ALT+F9 or if you select content and then press SHIFT+F9. These keyboard shortcuts toggle between displaying field codes and field code results.
 
When these keyboard shortcuts are accidentally pressed, users typically report that "text in brackets" is being displayed in their documents instead of the content that they expect to see. If you search Help, Microsoft Office Online, or the Microsoft Help and Support web site for "text" and "brackets", you won't find anything relevant. The reason for this is because technically, the text isn't in brackets; the text is in curly braces. If you search Help for "curly braces" you should find the Microsoft Office Online article entitled "Curly braces, \, and * appear in the document" at https://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word/HA101004281033.aspx which will tell you exactly what you're seeing and how to fix it. Here is how to fix the problem:
 
Press ALT+F9. Not only will the ALT+F9 key combination toggle between displaying field codes and field code results, ALT+F9 will select or clear an option in Word that will cause field codes to be displayed instead of field code results when a document is opened. The option that is selected or cleared depends on the version of Word that you're using.
 
Word 2007
ALT+F9 will select or clear the “Show field codes instead of their values” option in the “Show document content” options in the Advanced options in the Word Options dialog in Word 2007.
 
Word 2003 and earlier versions
ALT+F9 will select or clear the "Field codes" option in the Show options in the View tab of the Options dialog.
 
Alternatively, SHIFT+F9 will toggle between displaying field codes and their results; however, SHIFT+F9 will not select or clear the option that will cause field codes to be displayed instead of field code results when a document is opened.
 
See the following Microsoft Knowledge Base articles for more information.

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