word changed my text to symbols

[pstechnology]

Any idea why a word document that I typed in court on Thursday opens in all
symbols? The text when I opened it looks like a series of square boxes and
Chinese letters. This has happened on two separate occasions now. Is there
some conversion problem? I was taking notes at a PH on Thursday and have to
e-mail them to XXXX for Tuesday. Obviously the notes are useless. How can I
recover the text as typed on an urgent basis?

 

[Terry Farrell]

The symptoms you describe are for a corrupt document. Did you save the
document to the local hard disk drive? Did you copy it to another PC using
some type of REM media? Did you email the document as an attachment?

 

[pstechnology]

Using xp pro and Office 2003. this is the third time this has happened and I
am saving thte files to my documents on c: drive.

 

[Tom Ferguson]

It might be worth trying the repair macro here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...b9-a6b9-4618-9514-ec0c4a244570&displaylang=en

even although it is intended for a similar problem created in a certain
way.

Another possibility is opening the file using the "Recover text from any
document" filter.

For either of these, it is best to first save the document with a
different name and use that copy for repair attempts. That lowers the
risk of inadvertently losing the original.

That being said, this can be a font-encoding problem involving
non-Unicode fonts. What fonts are you using in the document?

Tom
MSMVP 1998-2007

 

[Terry Farrell]

That is very unusual and would normally point to a hardware problem. But
first, what happens if you use the Recover Text from any File option: is it
still totally garbage or can you see your text amongst all the unwanted
symbols?

(Am I correct in believing that you have good anti virus and that it is up
to date and that if have wireless enabled it is fully protected?)

Terry