[dmtrek14]

Hello all. I've been working on an article, adding some new things just the other day, but now that I'm trying to open it, all I am getting is boxes and symbols. Is there a way to retrieve the original Word document? I don't remember all that I've written and am afraid that I won't be able to get the file back. :sigh: Can anyone help?

 

[gistek]

First of all check that the font is one of the text fonts - like Times New Roman or Arial and not some odd Wingding or specialty font. Do this by highlighting the entire document and setting the font to a text font.

If that doesn't work, close without saving and try opening the document in Works, Open Office Writer, or Notepad. Sometimes you will get odd characters at the beginning and end, but buried in the middle may be the text of your article. I had one that wouldn't open in Word, but opened in MSWorks. There was about a page of junk then the text of my document, then more junk, then more text, some repeated, then more junk.

Restoring the document using this method was time consuming because I had to reformat and sometimes unscramble some things, but was better than re-typing the whole thing.

Since then I've kept redundant back-ups of my critical files so if one gets corrupted I only have to worry about a small part of the file that was recently updated.