Back Door to open corrupt document?

[LizW]

Hi there,

We had a document originally done in WordPerfect, that was saved into Word,
and then froze. We tried to bring it back up, and got the message:

Document name or path is not valid. Check File permissions or use File Open
to open the document.

File permissions were not the issue. And we kept getting that message on
trying to retrieve the file. We were able to open it in WordPad, but it lost
all formatting and 40 footnotes.

Is there anyway to get around this and retrieve a document in this
situation? A kind of Word Safe Mode, so to speak?

 

[Jay Freedman]

Hi Liz,

This problem has several possible causes. Have a look at this thread:
http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=D68C0422-286D-4DAD-8F59-D7300C1F2119@microsoft.com

 

[Genine]

Wordperfect and Word documents have a very different structure. The
conversion filters that are built in to both programs are never as good as
having your document converted and cleaned up by a specialist program. Unless
you're doing batch conversions though, it usually isn't cost effective to do
it that way.

If you still have Wordperfect you could try saving the file out as RTF and
then open the RTF document in Word and do a save as there.

Otherwise, if the file won't open in either program now, go to
http://download.openoffice.org/1.1.3/index.html and download open office
(it's free). Open office offers you the option to save out in various
formats and retains compatibility with a lot of word processor programs.

I work for several law firms and often use OO to open documents that won't
open in Word or Wordperfect. It's better than using the recover text from any
file option in Word as it filters out all the style information.

Once you've got the document back you can paste it into a new blank document
in Word and reformat it if necessary, which should fix most of the problems
caused by the Wordperfect file container.

Genine