Word 2003 suddenly can't open certain ".Doc" documents

[Bill D]

Hi:

After Googling my question and finding no answer, I came here with my
problem. In the last few days I noticed that some of my Documents are not
opening properly. All of my docs have the ".Doc" extension but some of them
are opening as Plain Text and they're blank!!

I first noticed that something was amiss when I opened a document yesterday
and Word asked permission to install a converter. I hurriedly said yes and
the document opened ok. I just figured that there had been a patch applied
by Windows Update.

Today when I went to open several other docs I found that some were ok while
others were blank and seemed to have many additional pages!

On my PC Word is part of MS Office 2003. I'm running Vista Home with all of
the latest updates. Oddly I even get Windows updates for MS Office 2007 and
I do not have it installed.

Any ideas?

Thanks

Bill

 

[JoAnn Paules]

Are these documents you created?

 

[finalword]

When you open a document, check the bottom most "File Type" box. Does it say
Recover any text from file or something other than Word document? If so, set
this back to All Word documents or Word document.

 

[Bill D]

I don't think that I Replied to the Group earlier. Sorry if this is a
duplicate.

Hi:

Yes these are created by me. Upon further investigation, it appears that
all of the documents created with Office 97 are "corrupted". The more
recent documents - created with Office 2003 seem to be ok.

However, there are some documents that I cannot draw conclusions about
because they've migrated back and forth between machines with different
versions of Office.

Thanks

Bill

 

[finalword]

For the documents still giving you trouble, see if the following steps help:
--Open the Document
--Go to Tools | Options | Save Tab
--Make sure that Disable Features Introduced After is NOT CHECKED
--Go to the Compatibility Options Tab
--Change the Compatibility to Word 2003
--File | Save As | Make sure that the File of Type is set to Word Document

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

And if it's possible that the documents were originally created in a version
older than Word 97, see "Information about certain file types that are
blocked after you install Office 2003 Service Pack 3" at
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=938810. If this is the answer, note that
Method 1 is what you want.

 

[Bill D]

Hi guys. Thanks for your help.

I made all of the suggested changes and still no fix.

I uninstalled and resinstalled MS Office 2003 and subsequently applied all
of the updates including SP3. At each step I tried to open the older files
but was unsucessful.

In an effort to recreate the problem, I created a document a document using
Office 97 on XP and transferred to a Vista machine with Office 2003
installed. As luck would have it, I was able to read the document without a
problem!

Since I can recover the documents from a backup, I guess I'll chalk this
whole episode up to gremlins.

My thanks to you all for your assistance.

Bill

 

[Bill D]

For those of you may happen upon this thread, here's the resolution.

Above half of the files in my Word Documents directory were corrupted. It
turned out that these documents never were really on my current drive to
begin with.

My old disk drive was dying so I had salvaged a number of files using
Windows Explorer, moving the files from the old drive to the new one. I
pulled them across at the Folder level expecting that all of the files in
the folder would be transferred. They were not as I found out for certain
directories. The data name was transferred but the underlying file was not.
Further, I had apparantly not opened these docs in over a year so it did not
"suddenly" happen.

The solution for me was to reinstall the old drive again (as a second drive)
and pull the documents across but this time at the file level.

It worked. The corruption of my two year old disk drive was root cause of
the problem - not MS Word.

Hope you find this helpful if you're in a similar predicament.

Bill

 

[finalword]

We recently had a similar situation. We couldn't open Word 2.0 documents ( I
know. They are really old! They came from a client though.).

I found this article helpful: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922849

Basically, one of the security patches turned off some of Office's backward
compatibility. You can get it back by modifying the registry like this:

http://msmvps.com/blogs/bradley/arc...-2007-or-in-word-2003.aspx?CommentPosted=true

Notice that there is a section for Office 2007 and one for Office 2003.