HELP!!!! Computer People! Corrupted Word File

ebykowsky

ebykowsky

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Help! I just spent 4 hours working on a paper due tomorrow, and was just about finished. Then, I found the file was corrupted when I shut down and booted back up... I tried running a de-corrupt thing on it, and that didn't work, and I tried recovering the file, and that didn't work...
Now, I tried opening in notepad, and here's a sample of what I get: «««ÿÊÊÊÿÊÊÊÿÞÞÞÿìììÿåååÿÓÓÓÿ¦¦¦ÿ„„„ÿkkkÿ{{{ÿ´´´ÿáááÿüüüÿóóóÿýýýÿÿÿÿÿøøøÿ÷÷÷ÿöööÿøøøÿùùùÿùùùÿùùùÿúúúÿúúúÿúúúÿúúúÿúúúÿúúúÿúúú

I know there are IT people on here, so HELP IF YOU CAN!!!
 
Problem solved. Geek Squad went deeeeeep into my computer and found an auto recovery file that didn't show up on the surface... pretty darn happy right now... I've officially become too reliant on POA.
 
Cheer up.... you could have had your printed version "kidnapped" by a bum.

Now, go rent "With Honors". Pesci was good and Moira Kelly was pretty special back then.
 
Another reason (among many) why I remain true to WordPerfect.
 
ebykowsky said:
Help! I just spent 4 hours working on a paper due tomorrow, and was just about finished. Then, I found the file was corrupted...
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When I was in university, a gal in front of the computer lab was typing up her essay. After about 20 min. I heard her say, "What?!" She didn't save any of it. It was all in RAM. That was the old Commodore 64, high-tech at the time. 5 1/2" floppy drive, 40 characters across etc.

Tough lesson to learn. :)
 
Art Master said:
When I was in university, a gal in front of the computer lab was typing up her essay. After about 20 min. I heard her say, "What?!" She didn't save any of it. It was all in RAM. That was the old Commodore 64, high-tech at the time. 5 1/2" floppy drive, 40 characters across etc.

Tough lesson to learn. :)
Click to expand...

In all fairness, I had saved the file plenty of times; Word literally just destroyed the entire thing and trashed all of my old versions.
 
And I thought this was a thread for me. Oh well.
 
Art Master said:
When I was in university, a gal in front of the computer lab was typing up her essay. After about 20 min. I heard her say, "What?!" She didn't save any of it. It was all in RAM. That was the old Commodore 64, high-tech at the time. 5 1/2" floppy drive, 40 characters across etc.

Tough lesson to learn. :)
Click to expand...

Here, I was about to give a similar story ---
the guy (foreign exchange student, to boot), writing his doctoral dissertation on the department's new VAX 11/780; got thru 75 pages of typing (over the course of about 8 hours). Nary a save came to mind.
Computer burped.
Never saw a guy cry that badly.
All I could do was to hold him.
Had to start from scratch, the next day.
30-odd years ago, but still feel bad for him.
<< And this was using MASS-11 --- real b*&^* compared to Word>>
(( I make a point that auto save is ALWAYS turned on, regardless of computer type. Am also religious about backups, for same reason ))
 
Use dropbox, and keep it saved in your dropbox folder. Dropbox maintains files several versions deep.
 
lionclaw said:
Use dropbox, and keep it saved in your dropbox folder. Dropbox maintains files several versions deep.
Click to expand...

Windows 7 actually does this and most people aren't aware of it (previous versions).
yjaheqav.jpg
 
John221us said:
Windows 7 actually does this and most people aren't aware of it (previous versions).
yjaheqav.jpg
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Yeah, I tried that but they were all gone. Ended up retrieving it from my "roaming" folder somewhere on the C drive.

And sorry Sac, corruption but no wish..
 
For MS Office Word 97. Click on the Office round icon in the upper left. A window will appear. Click on the button labelled "Word Options". From the window in options, click on "Save" from the list on the left. In that window, the top option click the drop down and change the format to save to "plain text (.txt)". Directly below that, change the 'minutes' to auto save to 1 or 2 minutes. Save the options.

When you decide to save a document, always use the Word icon button, and choose 'save as'. Then, you can save the document in Windows Word specific format, or you can continue to save as a text file until time to publish. Formatting will not be saved in the txt version.
 
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You can try Kernel for word recovery tool for the recovery of your corrupt word file.
 
RJM62 said:
Oh, you're the guy? :rolleyes:

-Rich
Click to expand...

Legal market share is still non-trivial.

Have tried to use Turd -- err, Word -- a few times, and it always "helps" so much that what I end up with is unrecognizable. Main thing is, if you are editing text, not newsletters and graphic purties, WP is so vastly superior it is not even close.

Also still well-supported and less-costly.

Not to mention the periodic doc format changes, designed to ensure that you have to upgrade to read stuff. You can open and edit a document created in the latest and greatest WordPerfect (X6) in 5.1 for DOS; there will (obviously) be features which it will ignore because it does not recognize them, but you can still open and edit.
 
SCCutler said:
Legal market share is still non-trivial.

Have tried to use Turd -- err, Word -- a few times, and it always "helps" so much that what I end up with is unrecognizable. Main thing is, if you are editing text, not newsletters and graphic purties, WP is so vastly superior it is not even close.

Also still well-supported and less-costly.

Not to mention the periodic doc format changes, designed to ensure that you have to upgrade to read stuff. You can open and edit a document created in the latest and greatest WordPerfect (X6) in 5.1 for DOS; there will (obviously) be features which it will ignore because it does not recognize them, but you can still open and edit.
Click to expand...

This is somewhat true. There are still many law firms on WordPerfect, mainly because of the their large investment in macros and the cost to convert and train. Most of the law firms I have worked with have made the transition to word, though, as pretty much all of their clients and most of the other law firms they exchange documentation with are on Word and new hires coming on board pretty much only know Word.
 
It has been a long time to come here and post something. Maybe ebykowsky would have resolved the problem but didn't come here to let others know. A corrupt Word file can be opened by using Open and Repair, if some minor issues there. But if fails, then a third-party recovery application is the last solution one can have. I know this because I've also faced such a situation once in my past. I tried SysInfoTools MS Word Docx Recovery software to fix my corrupt Word documents. It helped me recover my data from the corrupt documents and saved them to new files. Software's demo is free for download that enables users to see the preview of their recovered files.
Hope this information would be helpful here.
Regards.
 
Haha, dude major necropost! I ended up having Geek Squad dig deep down into a "roaming" file to dig out an obscure auto recovery file. I tried the software (not that one) but it wouldn't work. The underlying problem was with Windows and I just ended up reinstalling it.

Welcome to POA!
Where do you fly in Columbia?
 
For my needs, I need the capability to generate formatted reports with auto tables of contents, outline formatting, etc... all stuff Word does great, Word Perfect, not so much. Then again, I haven't used it since the introduction of Windows (I thought Word Perfect disappeared with DOS.) Open Office does a fairly good job as an MS office mimic but it's still not quite as good.

The problem is, in versions past Office 2003, no useful capabilities have been introduced to Word (and Excel), but the menus and commands have changed to a horrid tabular format with many previously accessible functions hidden or several more mouse clicks away.
 
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Palmpilot said:
Still being produced and sold, apparently.

http://www.corel.com/corel/product/index.jsp?storeKey=us&pid=prod4720105&trkid=NASEMGglOP

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_s...words=wordperfect&sprefix=wordperfect,aps,397

On my newest computer, I'm using Open Office. I'm not a heavy user of word processing, so I can't really give a useful prirep.

http://www.openoffice.org/
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I use Open Office at home, and it's perfectly fine for what I do at home but at work I still prefer MS Office.

Open Office has this annoying feature of using a common app launcher vs. just starting the word processor or spreadsheet or whatever. It's not a big deal but I wish I could turn that off and just open those individually. I mean, for the price, it's still pretty good.
 
Ha, thanks but I resolved the situation half a year ago. Welcome to POA though! We hope you stick around for awhile if you're interested!
 
ebykowsky said:
Ha, thanks but I resolved the situation half a year ago. Welcome to POA though! We hope you stick around for awhile if you're interested!
Click to expand...

Glad we could help.
 
Sac Arrow said:
Glad we could help.
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Thanks Sac. Pilot forums are the best place to go for everything from computer fixes to relationship advice to heated political rants.
 
Poll: will this thread become:
1) Instant spin zone material
2) An endless, undying thread about random foods
3) A name-calling thread where we bash various PoA members
4) A meritous discussion on how to recover lost computer data (won't be this one)
 
This is why you always save as a *.rtf file, even if it's gets a little messed up you can still crack it open in a text editor (like notepad) and salvage it.

As for office software I prefer LibreOffice, it's free, you can save as a PDF without third party software, open source and less buggy the M$ Office
 
OR
5) A place for people new to the forum to introduce themselves
 
2) OMFG I have to tell you about lunch. I ordered a double burger (lettuce wrapped) and the burger patties were half pounders. Dude next to me ordered a Hawaiian burger which was supposedly just spam, so he ordered a hamburger patty to put on it too making it a hamburger-spamburger. Except that unknownst to him, or the chick taking the order apparently, it already came with a burger patty so he got a double WITH spam. Long story short - I ended up with a triple burger. I'm in a hella food coma right now.
 
Nice... still can't compete with the arterial 7500 (or was it 7700?) I made last year.

Right now I'm grilling up some pork chops. Yum!!!
 
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