Word 2007 Recover Text from Any File

[Dale]

Hi, I have been experimenting with Word 2007's "Recover Text from Any File"
feature and so far all I get is gibberish. No text is recovered from the
file whatsoever. I also don't get any lists of styles or anything at the end
like I did in Word 2003. The files I am testing this on are not corrupt in
any way. I just recently switched from Word 2003 to Word 2007 and I'm just
exploring the program trying to see what’s different and what’s still the
same.

Has anyone else experienced this in Word 2007? Is there an option or a
setting somewhere I have to enable to get this feature to work right?

 

[Jay Freedman]

Hi, I have been experimenting with Word 2007's "Recover Text from Any File"
feature and so far all I get is gibberish. No text is recovered from the
file whatsoever. I also don't get any lists of styles or anything at the end
like I did in Word 2003. The files I am testing this on are not corrupt in
any way. I just recently switched from Word 2003 to Word 2007 and I'm just
exploring the program trying to see what’s different and what’s still the
same.

Has anyone else experienced this in Word 2007? Is there an option or a
setting somewhere I have to enable to get this feature to work right?

This feature works as before when the file you open is a Word 97-2003 format
document.

It won't work with a Word 2007 format (*.docx) document because that format is
really a zip file that contains multiple *.xml and other files in subfolders.
What you're seeing in the Recover Text result is just the compressed stuff.

Rename a copy of *.docx file to a .zip extension and open it, and extract the
file word\wordDocument.xml from it. You'll find your text in there, surrounded
by xml tags. The styles will be in the file word\styles.xml.

 

[Dale]

Hi, Jay, thanks for the information. I tried what you suggested and it
worked just as you described.