I installed office mac 2008 onto our mac.  We previously had office 2004.  I installed from the installation disk from the box.  It installed and deleted the former version of office.

Now, we have noticed all of my emails that I receive and web pages have words that are either missing letters or letters being written over the rest of the letters in the word.

How can I fix this?

________

So this sounds like a font issue. First thing to try is to run your microsoft office updates. (under the Help menu)

Here’s an excerpt from Microsoft’s support site: (suggestions after the jump)

“Office Fonts
Office 2008: Office 2008 uses a different method for fonts and many fonts are new optimized versions. Office 2008 will install fonts to the /Library/Fonts/Microsoft folder. By being at the root, then all users on the machine have access to them and you don't get Office 2008 putting multiple copies on the machine for each user.
With this method: Office font install offers the user a choice – have our fonts or don’t Preserve hard drive space on the user’s machine Leave the user’s older fonts alone so that the user can choose to re-enable them if they so desire Put MSFT fonts in a location that keeps them organized and easily identifiable to the user.
The installer will scour /Library/Fonts/ and ~/Library/Fonts/ for fonts with the same name and move them to /Library/Disabled Fonts/ or ~/Library/Disabled Fonts/ depending on where they were found.
If you install Office 2008 then later go back and install Office 2004, Office 2004 installer will not honor the new font location and re-install fonts in it's usual location (see below). If you are using both Office 2008 and 2004 this could be a problem depending on how you installed. Office 2004 can use the new fonts where using the old fonts with 2008 could be problematic. Just be sure to install 2004 BEFORE installing 2008.
Font Facts:
Despite the version number, many (if not all) of the MSFT fonts are newer than the Apple OS ones.
Office 2008 does not need ANY of its fonts to "run." However, various features of Office 2008 will be broken or display poorly unless you leave the fonts it installs in place.
Office 2008 relies on up-to-date Unicode versions of fonts that support ligatures and faces. Its own font set has been updated to provide these capabilities.
I would caution you not to disable the Chinese/Japanese fonts. These are required to produce certain special characters.

Office 2004: The fonts in /Applications/Microsoft Office 2004/Office/Fonts/ were put there by the CD Installer to act as a source, backup and repair. They're not used directly by Office. At the first launch of an Office application they are copied to ~/Library/Fonts/, replacing any older versions put there by earlier versions of Office. These are the fonts used by Office and other applications
The general method of OS X is to look first in your user folder, here ~/Library/Fonts/ . If there happens to be a particular font there, it overrides any version that may be in /Library/Fonts/ or /System/Library/Fonts/ - it doesn't even look there for those. In most cases, once it's done with the user Library, it then looks in /Library/Fonts/ for any fonts not already found in ~/. Only these fonts from /Library will appear in the fonts lists. On OS X, most well-behaved applications installing fonts will do so in ~/Library, since OS X is a multi-user environment. You or your administrator might choose /Library, but it will simply get overruled by any user installation of the same fonts. However, if a user should trash his own fonts, the /Library version will then come into play. (And it may be that the admin won't let individual users have permission to remove those.) Finally, if no version of a font exists in either user or local location the default version in /System/Library/Fonts will take over. And those can't (i.e. shouldn't - and don't try) be removed. The system can access these versions as it wishes, and won't be overruled by other versions of those fonts you might have in the other Fonts folders which take precedence in other circumstances.”
Contributed by Paul Berkowitz, Mac MVP
Here are a few suggestions that I found around the web:

Try resolving duplicates (from the edit menu in Font Book) and see if that helps...
or try this....

• Uninstall Office 2008
• Reboot your machine
• Install Office again. Do not proceed with a standard Installation. Go to the custom one.
• Uncheck the Office Fonts
• Install Office

or try this....
Open fontbook, select all the fonts, right click and select validate. All the fonts Office installed that are bad will show warnings. Remove those, and you'll be good as new without a reinstall.

Office is substituting system fonts for their own. ugh... In the long run, you may come to realize that iWork just works much better.


Here are some further links that may be helpful as well.

Information about the fonts that Office 2008 for Mac installs
Description of the Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac 12.1.1 Update
How fonts are installed in Office 2008