morning all Got a problem with a word document. It opened up ok yesterday but I've tried to open it today and it comes up with a box on the screen for file conversion asking to select encoding to make it readable! No matter which encoding I pick its all just gibberish on the screen. All my other word documents open ok, its just this one that won't and trust it to be one that I really need to get into! Its kept on a external hard drive if that makes a difference. Please help
File conversion box comes up on screen select the encoding that makes your document readable Text encoding Windows (default), MS-DOS, other encoding. Off these choices is the list of languages with a preview box. All of these just present gibberish on the preview window All other word docs open ok. I worked on this file yesterday.
Normally this would indicate a corrupted document if everything was ok the other day. Was it stored on an external drive or on a memory stick? Also what version of Word are you using Stu?
Cheers for the replies so far mate. Its saved on a external 500gb drive using word 2003. How can it get corupted between yesterday and today?
It could be a bad sector on the disk, or a problem during the write on the USB bus, normally windows would tell you if there was a write problem but you might just have been unlucky. Have you been able to try opening it on another computer? Only other thing I can suggest is send it to me and I will see if I can open it with any of my tools, I'll PM you an email address you can get me on.
Cheers for the offer mate, trouble is its a doc full of my passwords etc for banks and what not and don't feel comfortable sending it on. Wouldn't want to put you in that position either really. i'll try to open it on my oldman computer later to see if that works.
Ah no problem, I fully understand, I did ask in the PM if it were confidential. However you should have your knuckles rapped for not having a backup copy!
True true. Funnily I was going to make copies in the next few days. Bugger. I'm trying a word recovery progamme right now, it'll take a while but I'll see what it comes up with. thanks for the help jim, much appreciated.
