Word html opened in Dreamweaver now has odd empty boxes, like spaces

Word HTML is intended for printing, not viewing in a browser.  It probably also uses the Windows 1252 character set which is not the same as UTF-8 or Latin1.  And there are a lot of 'Microsoft Office' functions included in the file that most web design programs don't understand.

I tried the clean up and it didn't seem to help (other than the actual code looked much better), but there are some <span> tags that seem to have some tabs in them. I removed the tabs and it go rid of a lot of the boxes. But there are still some in between the menu items, where spaces would need to be. Also, this character is showing as one of the boxes:

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There's also a picture that shows in dreamweaver design, and Firefox, but shows broken in IE.

Can you post the link to the page or the page code here?  If you post the code here, please use the Code button in the editor to get it as a code block.

If you've been stuck with someone else's Word HTML, I sympathize.  When I get a Word file, I export it to text to avoid all that 'stuff' anc create the HTML from scratch.  It's much easier and faster.

did you just open the html in dw you should have done import instead

It would be very helpful to actually see what you are describing, to better help you.  Are you able to either provide a link to the actual web url for the doc, or provide a screenshot of both the design view, ie appearance, and the code itself?

Well, see, they put their work on a web draft server and we are supposed to review it and put it in the production server. The only reason I even opened it was to see why the picture wasn't showing. The weird thing, if I go to the site, it looks like whoever was previously in charge of the site must have used dreamweaver or something for an actual html page. But some of the pages have been either created or edited in word, and those are the pages that do not look right at all.

Well, I agree, but I'm not sure what to do when it's really not my job to edit it for them, but just to post. But my opening and previewing it in dreamweaver messed with their code.

So I'm unsure as to what the question is.  If you have code with invalid characters in DW but it looks ok in the browser, ignore it.  If you have invalid characters in the browser, there is no magic bullet that fixes it.  You are going to have to replace the invalid characters with proper HTML.

Well, it looked right until I opened it in dreamweaver, but now it doesn't. I guess I just didn't want to change it up because then when they tried to edit it they wouldn't know what was going on. But they probably won't anyway at this point. I'm not really sure how it's changed what they will see if they open it in Word.

It sounds like there are issues in your production environment and your teams need to meet to figure out a process.  As we have all noted above, Word is not the right tool for this job.  It's okay to provide page content in Word format, but someone on the web side of things needs to take on the responsibility to convert the Word doc to valid, standards-compliant HTML and CSS.  

Until you put that into play, you're going to suffer issues like this.

I agree with Jason.  I would point out to your people when the subject comes up that you can't maintain the web site when they submit files in Word HTML format.  Word HTML format is intended for printing, not web display pages.  This is a common problem with non-technical users.

>> Well, it looked right until I opened it in dreamweaver,

It probably had invalid markup.  DW will autocorrect invalid HTML to the best of its ability but depending on how bad the markup is, the cure can be worse than the disease.  If the tags from word are nested improperly, the autofix will create more problems because it can't follow the code.

like I said it does work if you import it works
see
http://susanlucas.com/dreamweaver/16.html

>> like I said it does work if you import it works

No, Ian, it doesn't always work on import.

The importer will frequently crash and burn, especially if the Word users are actually trying to use Word as a design tool and laying out tables, text boxes and other positional elements.

The importer can sometimes handle a straight content conversion but images and other elements are frequently screwed up or left out.

Thanks for the information everyone. I really appreciate it.