A Creative Communications Agency

Recently, ECMS Worldwide had a client complain that we were sending direct mail campaigns to one of their dealers with their company name constantly spelled wrong. Part of the dealer’s company name consisted of the word Tindell’s, which was always appearing as Tindillis. The problem being the apostrophe in Tindell’s was constantly rendering as an ‘i’ during the printer’s mail data dump.

At first glance it appeared to be a glitch during the inkjetting process. On closer inspection by the printer, Classic Graphics, they found a typographical glitch in the Excel spreadsheet, which was enough to confuse their computers into rendering the offending ‘i’ in the Tindell’s name. This particular error was quite intriguing because no other apostrophes were rendering incorrectly from the Excel spreadsheet we provided Classic Graphics.

So with a bit of detective work we backtracked to find where the offending apostrophe glyph could have come from. Testing the Arial apostrophe with the standard keyboard key and PC version of Excel proved the apostrophe to be correct. Then on to investigating Outlook for the possibility of a copy and paste error of an address turned up the problem…Outlook uses a completely different, if not incorrect, comma than that used in Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Outlook uses a slanted apostrophe as opposed to an upright apostrophe…This was enough to confuse the printer’s computers into inserting the ‘i’ in Tindillis.

This error was produced on Microsoft Office 2003 on Windows XP.