ASCII filter options

[deannaeg]

Welcome beginner. What is your question or comment?
Please try to briefly and clearly tell us: What you want, What you tried, and What happened.
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I am using open office 2.4 (just updated to that today) and my OS is windows excel I've run a check for any virus or malware or anything else I could think of and it's clean. These are documents that I've been working with regularly for several months - I save and as necessary go back to that to update and then save again so it's not even newly created documents. I have some saved in Oo writer and some saved as pdf. Gradually over the last couple of days I have gotten this error and it is now affecting all of these particular files - not all of the files in writer just this group of files.
I get the ascii filter options thing.
Any help would be GREATLY appreciated!!

thanks

[acknak]

If you try to open a document and OOo shows you the "ASCII Filter Options" window, it usually means that OOo can't figure out how to open the document.

Are you trying to open the PDF files, or the .odt files?

OOo can't open PDF files, so you should normally get the filter options window in that case.

If you get the filter options window when you try to open an ODF text document (.odt), then it's a bad sign--the document is probably corrupted. If this is what you're seeing, maybe you could attach one of your documents here, and we can see more clearly what's wrong with it.

[deannaeg]

I have a button to convert to pdf in Oo writer and a couple of them open fine - the others will open but i have to choose which program to open it with.
I don't know the file extentions on the other files - i just hit save as and rename it to update and that's it - that's all i've ever done ...so i don't know if they have an odt file ext or something else. i don't know how to attach a file on here....I've got one of the files I could do that with, it's just a simple calendar, but if you can tell me how to attach it i'll do it...how do files like that get corrupted ? is this something i need to clean up on my computer?

thanks!!

[acknak]

Sorry, just use the "Upload attachment" link below the message box after you click "POST A REPLY". If you want more info, try this: [Forum] How to attach a document here.

Don't worry, you really shouldn't need to know what kind of file it is, except when you need to debug a problem. Just attach here one of the files that OOo won't open, and we'll see where to go from there.

[deannaeg]

I REALLY do appreciate your help!!
I was looking in all the wrong places to figure out how to attach that
anyway this is one of the more simple files but really none of them are real complicated
thanks again

[acknak]

Well, ok. Despite the fact that the file name suggests that this is a MS Word document (the .doc ending), it is actually a PDF file, displaying a calendar for September 2008.

I don't know how this mismatch might have occurred, but I can well imagine that it's confusing the situation a lot, since Windows depends on the file name ending to correctly match what's actually in the file.

OOo cannot open this type of file--a PDF is not a word processing document--so it falls back to the lowest level and tries to open it as a plain text file, and finally puts up the filter selection window.

You can fix some of the problem by renaming the file with the matching ending: sept.pdf

You can tell if a file named "something.doc" is really a PDF file, if when you open it in OOo (just click OK for the filter window), you see %PDF-1.4 as the first line.

Don't save the file from OOo--it will be ruined if you do--just use OOo to check what type of file it is. You can close the file and "discard" it.

Where are we at this point? I'm not sure now what you need to do.

[Rarheesh]

This is a .odt file I cannot open this now please help

[acknak]

Sorry, I can't do anything with it. That is one seriously jumbled file--it looks like the bytes are swapped around. What happened to it?

[Rarheesh]

Thanks For what u did
Actually ,after typinng I just save it and when I open it on the very next day its showing like this.I am using Kubuntu 8 and it was an .odt file.So there is no way to recover it?

[acknak]

Well, here's a view of some data from your document file, compared to the same data from a good file. The differences all seem to be one-bit errors: the byte value is either the same, one lower, or one higher than the correct data. The colors show the differences: blue is low, yellow is high, others are the same. Gray is data that should be different, so we can't compare. (Click for a full-size view.)

This is just one component to the file; the other parts that I looked at have similar errors.

I can't see any pattern in the errors, and unless there's a pattern there's no way to repair the file. Maybe someone else has an idea.

I can't think of a reasonable scenario for how such errors might happen.