help!! word doc emergency UPDATE Crisis averted ...thanks to all who replied

carly

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sablade

maybe try the free openoffice program writer http://www.openoffice.org/

davetrousers

Backup what you have got several times, so things can't get any worse!

I take it she is using the same computer. Not another computer that has a new version of Word???

John_Gray

carly wrote: »

Hi all
Had an emergency phone call from panic stricken daughter. Thesis to be handed in on Tuesday. Documents created using Word 97 ( I know, I know dont ask me why so old )

Anyway one chapter will NOT open ( not for love or money ) seem to be corrupt. How can she retrieve it ?

This is a years work. She can open the doc in notepad but it is of limited use as none of the 26 tables appear correctly.

Are you saying that she can see everything in Word except this one corrupt chapter? What about the tables?

If everything bar one chapter is OK, cut and paste everything from the corrupt Word document to a new Word document. Save the new Word document.
Then try to retrieve the text from the corrupt chapter using Notepad, and try to put it into a copy of the new Word document. This may take several goes, and obviously the inserted text will have to be reformatted to match the rest of the document.

If the whole document is bad, then you have problems, and will need to try to see if you can open it in Wordpad (if you can find it on the PC), a very cut-down Word predecessor.

If that fails, you have major problems - there may be some Word document recovery programs which you can Google for, but always run them on a copy of the original corrupt Word document...

Good luck!

custardy

i know its blah blah blah you should back up etc but any chance she has an older version of the tables/chapters on a disc/usb stick floppy etc she could usee to get a part recovery from?

totalsolutions

i think word creates a temporary file while you are working, only 'saving' when told (check the auto saves as well). Now if word crashed as you say then search for the temporary files, they might be hidden, and have the extension .tmp

smileygill

She could try opening the chapter using the option in Word to "recover text from any file"; it's in the "files of type" drop-down in the "open" dialog box. It will grab what it can... the formatting will be messed-up but she might get something usable out of it.

But as it's tables, I'm not optimistic. I hope she has a draft or copy on her USB stick.

HTH

Mike_by_the_Sea

Hi Carly

There are some possible ways forward here

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/87856

Good luck

Mike

Gers

You could both use https://www.logmein.com so that you can actually log into her PC and see what's in front of her from yours- usually easier to sort what you can see. Not any help in recovering her corrupt document, sorry.

johnmc

I have had some success by dropping the file onto Internet Explorer.

Did you have any luck with OpenOffice.org?

Alcmene

Where is she based? She could try going to a Computing room at her University (many are open 24 hours) and seeing if there are any geeks around!