I have a very important document in Microsoft Word. When I tried to open it today, it half of it was just strange characters, and then it just starts reading fine.
It is like a bunch of rectangles and then after 14 pages; the last 2 pages read fine.
The entire document is in the Times New Roman font. Are there any ideas what may be causing this and how I can change it?
Posted by advice for robots (Member # 2544) on :
Try copying all the text into a straight text editor and then copying it all into a new Word doc. That's my solution when Word starts acting up like that. All Word's macros get cleared out and you can start fresh.
Posted by Jay (Member # 5786) on :
Ctrl Alt Delete
Have you rebooted recently? I assume it wasn't this way when you saved it last? Is all your information there?
Posted by lem (Member # 6914) on :
I tried copying and pasting in Notepad and Wordpad, but it is still messed up. The strange characters are different, but it is still not what I wrote.
I have rebooted my computer.
Posted by advice for robots (Member # 2544) on :
Is it a language feature problem? Is your language set to English?
Sorry, this has quickly reached the limit of my technical capability.
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
Ouch. If you paste into Notepad and still get weird characters -- especially blank boxes -- instead of text, you may indeed have a problem. Do you have a backup?
Posted by TrapperKeeper (Member # 7680) on :
I've seen this before, but sorry, don't remember the outcome.
Heres a couple ideas... highlight it all and make it all the same font. maybe somehow it picked some funky font that consists of squares.
Check and see if the text you wrote is intermingled in there somehwere. like way off the screen to the right somewhere.
also, I'm pretty sure some author posts in the other side of these forums, and I bet he uses a word processor of some sort. If anyone has seen stuff like this, it would be him. Haven't seen him answer too many tech support questions, but this might be more his domain.
Posted by lem (Member # 6914) on :
thanks for all the help. I will keep looking into this.
I have no back up, well..this is the back up. I lost the original disk. I will keep looking into it. I think I am going to reinstall abiword and openoffice. Maybe one of those will read it correctly.
I am wondering if I somehow activated a feature to scramble it for security.
Off to do research.
Posted by TrapperKeeper (Member # 7680) on :
Oh, maybe a reverse compatibility issue. Maybe it was initially written on Office XP, then you tried to open it on 97.
I think that might do it.
Posted by TMedina (Member # 6649) on :
You can try opening the file in WordPad to bypass the bells and whistles of MS Word.
Are you having problems opening any other files in MS Word? Has MS Word generated, to the best of your knowledge, any other issues?