MS Word for Mac 2011 - emailed .docs are not formatted as written

It is probably not a setting in Word or Office, but likely either your or their ISP stripping stuff out of the file when it is sent. When a file is sent over email, it is encoded as text since that is the only thing email can handle. It then gets decoded on the receiver end. Sometimes, zipping the files will protect them from that. As far as I can tell, the file formats are the same.
However, I don't have 2011, so I'm not sure what it might be doing.

Anyone know enough here about MS Office

You may also want to search/ask in the forums where the MS experts help with their products, e.g.

http://www.officeformac.com/ProductForums/Word

Here's a thought.. This might be a time to check your file compatibility between Office versions. Take one of the documents and open up the "Get Info" window on it. Check to be sure that you've selected the feature, "Open with:" Microsoft Word. If it says something else like "TextEdit" then this might the culprit. If this fixes the problem you should do something similar with the PPT and Excel.

If it is a font problem, then go to Word, Preferences, Compatibility, and click on "font Substitutions" button.

BTW, I can open all M/S files in 2011 and created with different M/S Office versions including Mac and Windows, and retain formatting between them.

E-mail transmission is not going to corrupt a Word document. Complex e-mail messages with multiple attachments can become corrupted this way, but not the attachments themselves.

It is probably a missing font on your machine.

On the Word menu, click Preferences.
Under Output and Sharing, click Compatibility.
Click Font Substitution.
Under Font substitutions, select the font that you want to replace.
On the Substituted font pop-up menu, click the font that you want to use for the substitution.

DHodges wrote:
I 'Saved As' a Word for Mac " .docm " - and the documents appear normal (though I had to switch one to 'Portrait' as it for some reason wanted to display in landsacpe.

That is not "Word for Mac", that is Macro-enabled document. It is under "specialty formats". Don't use that. Use "Word Document .docx" and if someone can't read that, save as ".doc" instead.

I've just never seen a .docm file before.

DHodges wrote:
Thanks; this last reply came closest to 'solving' the issue. While I selected font sub, it at first had no affect on the document.

I then went back to prefs and set the compatability dropdown from 'Custom' (where it had defaulted) to 'Word 2004-2007', assuming these docs were created from a recent past Windows.

I 'Saved As' a Word for Mac " .docm "

Whoa... the extensions mean something. Your original problem (document shows bold, italic, underline, but tables and other complex formatting are lost) sounds as though the document was being exported as a .RTF, a Rich Text Format file. If you save as a .DOCM, that's a Word Macro Enabled Document. Regular Word 2007, 2008, 2010 and 2011 docs are .DOCX. Regular Word 97 through 2004 docs are .DOC. You need to save that document as a .DOCX or a .DOC or you're gonna have problems later.

- and the documents appear normal (though I had to switch one to 'Portrait' as it for some reason wanted to display in landsacpe.

Normally you'd have to select page orientation.

So, poor testing on my part. I have no idea which of the above steps fixed it but I'm guessing the 'Save As' to my version of Word.
If so, it would appear the 'Compatability' feature was not working at least on these two documents.

Word's compatibility feature is supposed to ensure that a document you produce is compatible with the target version of Word. If you turn the compatibility stuff on then you will be warned if you are using Word 2007 through 2011 and you use a feature that earlier versions of Word do not have. Microsoft shipped a translator which works with Office 2003 and 2004 and which allows Word 2003 or 2004 to read Word 2007, 2008, 2010, or 2011 documents (.DOCX) and to save them as Word 97 through 2004 documents (.DOC) _as long as they don't have any incompatible features_. Word's compatibility features doesn't do much for .RTFs or for .DOCMs.