why do I have a black square in the middle of my page

Hi bezigzagman,

I'm sorry that your file didn't convert as expected. Please try the conversion from within Reader, and disable OCR by following the instructions in this document: How to disable Optical Character Recognition (OCR) when converting PDF to Word or Excel. Disabling OCR can solve some conversion issues (but note that if your original PDF contains images with text, that text won't be selectable/searchable) in Word.

Best,

Sara