Scambled Word document on a Mac

Hey guys,

Something happened to my computer, my little Mac Mini last night, it wouldn't turn off so I pulled the plug. Today my girlfriend was working on her thesis on Word and she saved it and closed it. When she reopened the document it was like computer code or something.

First this happens..

Convert File

Convert file from..

Text Only
MS-DOS Text
Rich Text Format RTF
HTLM Document
Web Archive
etc ec etc...

Then THIS!...

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Any ideas guys?

Her thesis is basically gone so any help would be much appreciated!!

Danke.

Looks like it was auto saved to Mac format. Save it to something external before you go any further just to be on the safe side. You may have to open it in a Mac program and save to RTF and then open it in the Word program. I get files that look like this all the time from scientists in Japan. I just forward it to a Mac computer and do the above.

If you look in the /Users/username/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems (where username is the user who was logged on) folder you might see a copy of the file.

It'll have a name something like this: dftmpFBECIPPLkkkkkkkk--------

Take a copy, rename it with .doc on the end and try and open it.

If there's nothing there do a search by date and time on your home directory.

You could also look in /tmp/50n (where 50n is your userid number, probably 500, 501 or 502). Open /tmp from the Finder - Apple-Shift-G, then type in '/tmp' without the quotes and hit Enter.

Definitely follow the advice above. Something similar happened to me once while I was working on a Powerpoint project. It was very late at night, and I was finishing up a poster for a conference that I had to leave for the next day. I don't know what happened, but all of a sudden my Powerpoint document was completely blank and saved completely blank. I actually started a thread on here about it, so do a search and maybe you'll see all the suggestions I got. It was in July of last year. Anyway, after looking through temp files and doing everything I possibly could to recover the file, I finally shut down Powerpoint and may have even shut down mu computer (can't remember). When I reopened Powerpoint, it asked if I wanted to recover my file. Yes, yes, yes! After 3 hours of fiddling with it, at stupid o'clock in the morning, I had my recovered file.

Hey thanks so much guys,

I am completely computer stupid and I am very grateful for all the responses. I will try to follow the advice, and lets see what will happen.

Thanks again, and I will keep ye updated on my progress!!

Go raibh mile maith agat! (Thanks a thousand!)

Jamie.

Okay, no luck yet, but this is coming up sometimes now...(I wish I could post the screen shot instead of this!!)

Can't load Visual Basic for Applications
Make sure visual basic for Applications is installed on your computer. If Visual basics for Applications is installed, make sure the path to the installation folder does not contain any charaacters outside of the system code page (such as Cyrillic characters on an English system) and contains fewer than 255 characters.

Thanks again guys,
I wish there was a "stupid button" for people like me on my computer.

Jamie.

Seems like your hard disk has got corrupted.

Reboot from the Mac OS X Install DVD, holding down the 'C' key so it boots from the DVD. You have to click a couple of times, but just before the install starts, you can go to a Utilities or Tools menu & choose Disk Utility. When it starts, select the hard disk and choose 'repair disk'.

Run that a couple of times. If it doesn't work you'll need to back your data, format the disk and re-install. Don't format the disk without backing your data up.

If Disk Utility works OK, reboot normally, then try restarting Word. If you still get errors, re-install Microsoft Office from the CD.

This is where products like Adobe Acrobat come to the rescue... Save it to .PDF and read it on ant machine PC,MAC,Unix with the free adobe reader.