Microsoft Word Document has wierd symbols :(

[xxjaylo]

HI guys, my son was working on his coursework for school and suddenly some windows pooped up and now it has gone from 4 pages to 34 pages and it has boxes and chinese and other symbols on it


does any1 know how to change this back into normal text plz?

thanks in advance

 

[Kips]

Check what version the document was created on and what version you have on your machine, looks like yours is older. You can download convertors.

 

[pecksta]

Have you tried the UNDO ?
Do you get any error messages when you open the DOC ?
if so try opening WORD goto File OPEN, find your Doc and change the option to Open & Repare

Or if you think its just a font change click selct all (Ctrl+A) then change the font

 

[karym6]

I think Word also has an option there to recover corrupt files.

 

[MH]

I suspect its a 2007 doc and you are using 2003 without the converter addon

 

[xxjaylo]

thanks for the fast replies

i created it on MS WORD 2003 and im opening it on MS WORD 2003 and all the wierd symbols still come up

the UNDO button didnt work i tried it as soon as this happened

 

[pecksta]

You could try downloading Open Office
Using the Open Writer (MSWORD) it may resolve your issue.
In the past it has fixed issues for DOC, PPT and XLS files for me

 

[karym6]

Thats true, I use OpenOffice and it is rather good at ficing up Word files.

 

[xxjaylo]

i opened it up in openoffice and it decreased to 4 pages as it use to be, but it still has all the symbols and boxes

 

[karym6]

Did you save it in word before opening it in open office?

 

[xxjaylo]

ye i saved it in word the opened in openoffice and it was 5 pages long, then i tried it again buh this time i used copy and paste and it came to 4 pages

 

[karym6]

Saving it in word may have preserved any corruption there was.

You can try something like this: Ms Word recovery for any corrupt Word document

However, is there a chance that the document can be written again?

 

[xxjaylo]

i jus tried that program and it doesnt work, the document can be written again, its just that he spent a lot of time doing it and now he has to think about what he wrote etc

 

[karym6]

When it was opened in Word the first time, did Word prompt to try and fix it? Word does have a recovery feature available, if you choose not to then its quite hard to recover from it after that point.

Saving it when it is still gubbed will make the job even harder.

 

[xxjaylo]

nope when i opened it the first time it didnt ask me to try n fix it, it just opened with all these symbols etc

 

[hamba]

Have you checked to make sure the text hasn't been reformatted to wingding fonts?

 

[xxjaylo]

yup i tried that before, its not in another font