Help! All my text has turned into lines of boxes!

[harmony]

Can someone help me? I am writing a book and saved it last night on my pen
drive and when I opened it this morning all the text had turned into lines of
boxes. I can't figure out how to change it back. I tried all this but it
did NOT work:

If all the text appears garbled or as question marks, then Microsoft Word
may not have accurately detected the encoding standard of text in the file.
As a result, Word may have used the wrong encoding standard.

To have Word use an encoding standard you select:

On the Tools menu, click Options, and then click the General tab.
Select the Confirm conversion at Open check box.
Close and then reopen the encoded file.
In the Convert File dialog box, select Encoded Text.
In the File Conversion dialog box, select Other encoding, and then select
the encoding standard you want in the list.

Does anyone know how to fix my text or have I just lost everything I wrote?

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Maybe....

When you use File | Open, if Recover Text From Any File is selected, it
might result in this appearance. Open by double-clicking instead.

However--Word creates a lot of temporary files in the same location as
the doc you are working on, and it needs lots of room to do this. If you
open a Word doc directly from removable media to edit it, then those
temp files are created on the floppy disk or pen drive or whatever. When
it runs out of room, the doc is likely to corrupt.

Pen drives/flash drives are far better than floppy disks, because much
bigger, but still not 100% safe. You may have been hit by this issue.

It's safest to copy from the pen drive to the hard drive, edit, then
copy back the updated file. (If that is impossible, close the doc
periodically to clear out the temporary files---and email yourself
backups, because that's not necessarily totally reliable).

There are other ways to try uncorrupting a document--what version of
Word is this?

 

[harmony]

It's Word 2002

Maybe....

When you use File | Open, if Recover Text From Any File is selected, it
might result in this appearance. Open by double-clicking instead.

However--Word creates a lot of temporary files in the same location as
the doc you are working on, and it needs lots of room to do this. If you
open a Word doc directly from removable media to edit it, then those
temp files are created on the floppy disk or pen drive or whatever. When
it runs out of room, the doc is likely to corrupt.

Pen drives/flash drives are far better than floppy disks, because much
bigger, but still not 100% safe. You may have been hit by this issue.

It's safest to copy from the pen drive to the hard drive, edit, then
copy back the updated file. (If that is impossible, close the doc
periodically to clear out the temporary files---and email yourself
backups, because that's not necessarily totally reliable).

There are other ways to try uncorrupting a document--what version of
Word is this?

 

[Michel Bintener]

Even though you will probably get an answer in this newsgroup, you
should know that this is a newsgroup for Word for Macintosh. Your
chances of finding a solution are higher if you post your question in a
Word for Windows newsgroup. Nevertheless, a number of experts in here
are used to dealing with cross-platform issues, so stick around!

--
Michel Bintener
Microsoft MVP
Office:Mac (Entourage & Word)

***Always reply to the newsgroup.***

 

[Clive Huggan]

For future reference: here's where all the Microsoft discussion groups are
listed: http://www.microsoft.com/office/community/en-us/FlyoutOverview.mspx

Clive Huggan
============