"Select Encoding that makes your document readable...?????"

[emma_jayne]

Hiya
I am trying to open a document that I complied for my MSc. I want to copy
and paste it into a powerpoint presentation for a job interview I have. For
some reason everytime I open it it coes up with the above message and then
asks me to select the 'Text Encoding' I have no idea what this means and when
I do actually open it all I can see are little square boxes and no text!
I tried inserting my Office CD to install something that was missing??? but
it didn't work.
Please help!

 

[Ed]

Hi emma_jayne,

I doubt that any of this will help but until something better comes along ...

It looks like Word doesn't recognise your document as a Word document.

Is it possible that you're opening a temporary file that Word creates
instead of the real document? The temporary file I'm thinking of is created
in the same folder as the document and is sometimes left behind when a
document is closed. It has a name which is very similar to the real document
name - the first two characters are replaced by "~$".

If that's not the case then are you opening the document from some sort of
removable media such as floppy disk or whatever? From various postings in the
newsgroups it seems that opening a document directly from removable media can
lead to document corruption. If so, can you copy the document to your hard
disk and try opening it from there (although if it's damaged already that
probably won't work either)?

Some versions of Word have an option to repair some types of damage in
documents. To carry out a repair, bring up the File/Open dialog and click the
document once to select it, then instead of clicking Open, click the little
dropdown arrow on the Open button and choose "Open and repair". If a "Show
Repairs" dialog appears, just close it.

If all else fails you might be able to salvage at least the text of the
document. The result won't be pretty but might be better than nothing. To do
this (I'm using Word 2003) bring up Word's File/Open dialog and in the "Files
of type" dropdown select "Recover text from any file", then select your
document and open it.

(If you try this then after you've salvaged what you can, bring up the
File/Open dialog again and check that the "Files of type" entry hasn't stayed
"Recover text from any file". I've a suspicion that in some versions of Word
that setting would sometimes "stick".)

Regards and good luck!

Ed