Essay turned to hashes ####

[Mannymonster]

Ive just written an essay for my college and now this program is opening a box saying ASCII filter options and when i click ok its just shows up all my writing in ###################################### can someone help me please my college work is in tomorrow and this program has sure p***** me off, am sorry i dont have time to look around these forums for an answer thank you

Title Edited. A descriptive title for posts helps others who are searching for solutions and increases the chances of a reply (Hagar, Moderator).

[Hagar Delest]

Sadly, quite nothing to do, see: 22 pages term paper replaced with pound signs.
Any power shortage for example? It's a common root cause of such problem.

Check the temporary folder of the system (see in OOo Tools>Options>OOo>Paths). If there are folders like sgmlf.tmp with a file having the same name inside, make a copy of that file, rename it in .odt and cross your fingers. Else, I hope you had a backup (or a copy in a mailbox)...

NB: it seems that there are less reports about this with AOO 3.4.1. What version do you use exactly? Your signature only says 3.

[TheGurkha]

Ive just written an essay for my college and now this program is opening a box saying ASCII filter options and when i click ok its just shows up all my writing in ###################################### can someone help me please my college work is in tomorrow and this program has sure p***** me off, am sorry i dont have time to look around these forums for an answer thank you

Title Edited. A descriptive title for posts helps others who are searching for solutions and increases the chances of a reply (Hagar, Moderator).

You've learned the hard lesson that comes to us all. No matter what software you use, you need to make backups. Make several copies of your work as you go along. If anything you do on a computer is of importance to you, it should be stored in several different places.

[RoryOF]

This may have happened for any one of a number of reasons: the principal reason is shutting down your computer too quickly, which doesn't allow the file buffers flush the complicated structure of an OpenOffice file. Another reason is allowing your computer to sleep/hibernate with an OpenOffice file open - OpenOffice does not like this. Power failure, be it brown out on the electricity grid or low battery, again can cause file loss (related to the extra time needed to save the file structure?). System crashes can lose everything in progress; if your computer is prone to crashes, you should investigate why.