encoded text will not re-encoded to english text

[shae668]

I have a document that I have been working on and today it had trouble
closing, then when I went to reopen it it had text like this:
..????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
o; and I have tried all I can understand to fix the problem but nothing
works, can someone give me some plain simple english explnations as to what
happened and what I can do to fix this problem?

Thankyou.

 

[Terry Farrell]

That looks totally corrupt. You have several options.

Start by using File, Open, selecting the file and use Open and Repair. If it
is still corrupt...
File, Open and use the Recover Text from Any File option. If it is still
corrupt...
Try Opening it in WordPad. Finally...
Try opening it in Notepad which will let you recover just the blocks of
text.

If all these fail, then the document has been badly corrupted. Were you
saving it to your local hard disk drive?

 

[SG]

Hi Terry,

I'm having a similar problem to shae668 except instead of question marks my
document has come up as Chinese or Japanese symbols, blank sections and
boxes. This problem occured as I attempted to transfer the document from the
C drive, where it was originally saved, to my USB to print from another
computer. I had an older copy of the document on the USB, and the computer
would not let me replace the old copy with the new one. I deleted the older
copy so I would be able to save the new one to the USB and this is when the
corruption occured. I have tried all the steps you suggested to shae668 and
have managed to recover only a few sentances and one picture. I think
something has gone wrong with the scripting language, as Word itself is not
recognising a format change in the document. I have been experiencing many
other problems in the past with this particular laptop, but I'm not sure if
it is virus/spyware related. Any other suggestions on how I may be able to
recover my document?

 

[Terry Farrell]

Did you open the document from the USB drive or did you copy it to the Local
HDD first?

USB flash memory and other forms or REM media are notorious for corrupting
the structure of document. You should always work directly with your local
HDD and copy to and from the REM media.

Terry