Word 2008

Hi everyone,

For the last 2 days I have been working on an assignment for my university. 5 minutes ago I try opening the docx document again and it is all written in code. My sister worked on this computer yesterday, she told me she may have deleted the microsoft office files under my documents (used as a backup I believe, but still this shouldn't affect the saved document right?)

please help. I don't feel like rewriting 50 pages.

Oh and sorry if this is posted in the wrong forum.

tnx

Anything that was deleted off your internal hard drive would be in your trash can, unless she followed up by clicking the "empty trash" button. You should be able to click the trash can on your dock and restore any items that it contains.

Perhaps she is referring to the Microsoft User Data folder in your Documents. This folder should be left alone. I don't think deleting it would harm your Word installation, but anything is possible. If Office finds it missing, I think it just recreates it.

Do you use Entourage? If so, are your old emails still there? If Microsoft User Data was deleted, they would be gone. If you emails are in tact then it probably wasn't touched.

I have Word 2008. If you want to email me the file, I'll try to open it. That would let you know if it is a corrupted Word file or if your Office installation was damaged somehow. jaygray AT bellsouth DOT net.

Ok I will email it to you, it used to be like 8 mb, now it is only 2 mb.

My email reply back to Lex. Perhaps someone else has an idea...

"It doesn’t look good. It’s definitely corrupted. I opened it in Word 2008, Pages, and Quicklook—all with the same results.

I don’t know what would cause this. If you’re using a desktop Mac, my guess would be a power surge/flicker during the saving of the file. If your Word software is working fine with other documents, then most likely there is not a problem with it’s installation. Word is not really known for having these type of problems.

A google search reveals several Windows based software options for repairing corrupt docx files. Most were shareware which needed to be purchased. None were for OS X. If you have a Windows PC, these could be an option.

I don’t suppose you happen to backup with Time Machine. That could be a lifesaver here.

Wish I had better news."

A bit of a long shot this. My wife recently received a couple of .docx files which would not load into her copy of Word. I simply deleted the x from the file name and opended the .doc file in Open Office on my mac. The files opened perfectly and I was able to email them back to her Windows machine whereher Word opened them quite happily.

Most folk do not know about XML converters so go into Word Preferences and make the default save .doc rather than .docx. As a last resort save the document to desktop, pop in the Office CD, delete Ofice 2008, and install a nice new copy. You can use the same keycode as original, activate and Microsoft just allocates a slightly different user ID.