Word cannot find files!

[Jeff]

My wife has encountered a weird problem using Word. She still uses Word 97
on a Windows 98 SE PC and does not want to change because she is busy with a
teaching project at a university.

She has all her Word data files in a single folder (separate partition from
Word's) which contains several subfolders for the various courses she is
involved in. Everything worked fine till yesterday. Yesterday, within Word
she clicked on File/Open and the subfolder she was working in and found that
though most of her files were there, a few (3-4) she was looking for were
missing. In panic, she called for my help (I am the home PC "guru"). She
was right. Most of the files showed up on Word's File/Open screen but the 3
she wanted did not show there.

Using Windows "find" utility, I found the files were where they were
supposed to be - in that Word data folder, but they still did not appear in
Word's "File/Open" screen. They opened just fine in Word when I clicked on
them in the Windows "find files" screen, so they were intact on the HD where
they were supposed to be. It's just Word that could not find them.

Anything I can do to solve this annoying problem?

I recently defragmented her HD if that helps explain things. (Yes, she has
backups).

Jeff

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

If she has file extensions displayed and is not used to this, she may have
inadvertently removed the file extension when renaming a document (though
when you do this, you do usually get a warning that the file many become
"unusable"). When you display Word Documents or All Word Documents in File
Open, you see only files that have a .doc or .doc, .dot, .htm, .rtf, etc.,
extension. If your wife changes the setting to All Files, very likely she
will see her "missing" documents. If she renames them again to add the .doc
extension, all should be back to normal.