Doc recovery

[Handley_Page]

Sysadmin blog. What do you do when a critical Word document won’t open? Even in today’s world of versioned documents, it is entirely possible for corruption to squeak in and go unnoticed, wrecking your entire version history.

Those with this (hopefully) occasional problem might find this of use. I did!

 

[Zeb_Carter]

The solution is even easier...don't use .docx to save your word docs.

 

[Handley_Page]

The solution is even easier...don't use .docx to save your word docs.

Now, there you have put your finger on an important point.
The snag is that, with Word, you don't have much choice, unless you burrow into its internals.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Now, there you have put your finger on an important point.
The snag is that, with Word, you don't have much choice, unless you burrow into its internals.

"Save as" -> ".doc" should do it, surely?

 

[Zeb_Carter]

Now, there you have put your finger on an important point.
The snag is that, with Word, you don't have much choice, unless you burrow into its internals.

"Save as" -> ".doc" should do it, surely?

You can even set that as the default.

In options, click on "Save" tab, first selection is "Save files in this format:".

In Word 2007 and above you get to the option by clicking on the circle in the upper left corner of the window and then click option at the bottom of the dialog that is presented.

 

[Handley_Page]

THIS might also shed a little (if confusing) light.

 

[oggbashan]

THIS might also shed a little (if confusing) light.

I save my stories as .txt files (as well as .doc).

As .txt they can be read on almost any device and are very small files.

 

[Hypoxia]

I use a free tabbed editor, Jarte, which comes with a nifty dictionary/thesaurus, WordWeb. Jarte reads .DOCX, reads and writes .DOC, .RTF, .TXT, and writes .PDF and .HTML. It does NOT include Word's change tracking, and the .DOC it writes is universally readable. Everything I've saved is pretty tight. Much smaller footprint than Word. I still run texts through Word2003 for grammar checking, but all my writing now happens with Jarte+WordWeb.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

There are tons of free open any file programs out there...

Unfortunately, every one I looked at was loaded with spyware, trojans and viruses. Luckily, Chrome or my Virus checker caught them even before they were completely downloaded.

Some were even on sites like CNET Download, with comments about how bad they were infected. PC World did a review about one and comments on the review were about how bad the spyware/viruses were.

You would think that both sites would pull the offending items?

 

[Handley_Page]

There are tons of free open any file programs out there...

Unfortunately, every one I looked at was loaded with spyware, trojans and viruses. Luckily, Chrome or my Virus checker caught them even before they were completely downloaded.

Some were even on sites like CNET Download, with comments about how bad they were infected. PC World did a review about one and comments on the review were about how bad the spyware/viruses were.

You would think that both sites would pull the offending items?

Or fix the damn files!