none of the file conversion options show correct characters

[Guest]

I am trying to open some word documents from last year. I get a file
conversion window with encoding options to select. None of them show the
correct characters in the preview section, all are garbage. What can I do??
I am currently using word 2003 (11.8106.6568) SP2 Part of MS Office
Professional edition 2003

 

[Graham Mayor]

Would these have been saved on floppy disc by any chance? Never ever read
from, write to, or print from floppy with Word. These are the most certain
methods of ensuring document corruption.

Copy to the hard disc and work on the document from there.

This is equally relevant to other removable media such as CDRW.

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Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com

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[Guest]

,No these are kept in a folder under 'my documents' on my computer. The ones
I saved in 2005 I can still open and read ok.
Does this mean they have somehow been corrupted and cannot be fixed? It is
not highly urgent but I just wanted to know what had happened and why.

 

[Guest]

Hi I'm having the same problem as starshine, but It's a file I wrote on this
laptop, and have used since to print off, and I really need this file as It's
going to be reassessed for uni. Everything I've tried has failed can you help
please?

 

[Graham Mayor]

It appears that the document is corrupt, but if you have a printout you can
use OCR to recover the text from the print, which will mean some editing but
a lot less typing.

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Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com

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