P
PAB
Apologies for being really untechnical, which will probably show in
this post, but I am pretty desperate and will be grateful for any
advice.
Using Word (MS Office Pro 2003) a couple of days ago, when I had an
error message from my printer. I am ashamed not to have noted what it
was, but it seemed fairly minor and I carried on wordprocessing.
What then happened was that all of my Word documents in the same
folder showed as pages and pages of odd characters - different
characters for different files (e.g. squares or $ signs etc), but the
same one throughout each affected document. When trying to open SOME
(but not all) of the affected documents, I am offered a dialogue box,
asking me to select the appropriate encoding - nothing which is
selected gives anything readable.
No other Word documents are affected.
I have tried a couple of freeware repair utilities, but both simply
produced a blank document - no data at all. My local PC store -
always very helpful - asked me to copy the affected files to disk,
which I did; they have had no luck inrecovering them and suggested I
take in the PC itself, so that they can work on the original files,
but made it clear that they don't think there is much chance of being
able to recover anything at all.
Of course, I'm happy to try anything, but am desperate for a solution
as soon as possible, as all the affected files (several hundred) are
teaching material for the new academic year (starts tomorrow!)
I hope that this makes some sense and will be so grateful if anyone
can help out.
Thanks and best wishes
PAB
this post, but I am pretty desperate and will be grateful for any
advice.
Using Word (MS Office Pro 2003) a couple of days ago, when I had an
error message from my printer. I am ashamed not to have noted what it
was, but it seemed fairly minor and I carried on wordprocessing.
What then happened was that all of my Word documents in the same
folder showed as pages and pages of odd characters - different
characters for different files (e.g. squares or $ signs etc), but the
same one throughout each affected document. When trying to open SOME
(but not all) of the affected documents, I am offered a dialogue box,
asking me to select the appropriate encoding - nothing which is
selected gives anything readable.
No other Word documents are affected.
I have tried a couple of freeware repair utilities, but both simply
produced a blank document - no data at all. My local PC store -
always very helpful - asked me to copy the affected files to disk,
which I did; they have had no luck inrecovering them and suggested I
take in the PC itself, so that they can work on the original files,
but made it clear that they don't think there is much chance of being
able to recover anything at all.
Of course, I'm happy to try anything, but am desperate for a solution
as soon as possible, as all the affected files (several hundred) are
teaching material for the new academic year (starts tomorrow!)
I hope that this makes some sense and will be so grateful if anyone
can help out.
Thanks and best wishes
PAB