M-Books - A Guide to MATLAB for Beginners and Experienced Users - page 100

thecharactercombination“:)”,aconstructoftenusedwhenspecifyingtherows
of a matrix, which Word converts to a “smiley face” ..

; and various dashes that
wreak havoc with MATLAB's attempts to interpret an ordinary hyphen as a
minus sign. Examine these in Tools : AutoCorrect... and, if you use M-books
regularly, consider turning them off.
A more insidious problem is the following. If you cut and paste character
strings into an input cell, the characters in the original font may be converted
into something you don't anticipate in the Courier input cell. Mysterious and
unfathomable error messages upon execution are a tip-off to this problem. In
general, you should not copy cells for evaluation unless it is from a cell that
has already been evaluated successfully — it is safer to type in the line anew.
Finally, we have seen instances in which a cell, for no discernible reason,
fails to evaluate. If this happens, try typing CTRL+ENTER again. If that fails, you
may have to delete and retype the cell. We have also occasionally experienced
the following problem: Reevaluation of a cell causes its output to appear in an
unpredictable place elsewhere in the M-book — sometimes even obliterating
unrelated output in that locale. If that happens, click on the Undo button on
the Word tool bar, retype the input cell before evaluating, and delete the old
input cell.