Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

Hello dear community,

I'm offering a cash reward of 100$ for the last saved version of my dissertation. I was working on it as a .doc in open office, and when the platform crashed, I haven't been able to open the file, neither on my computer through o.o., nor on other devices with other apps (I tried pages on my iPhone, no luck).

The business transaction I am proposing is this:
I will send you the file, you will successfully extract/fix it and screenshot the first page so that I know my most recent work (which I had saved multiple times before the crash). Satisfied and supremely happy, I will get you the 100$ through Paypal or another secure channel. You will email me the whole, workable doc at this point and our transaction will be concluded. Everybody wins and fingers crossed I won't have lost a ton of work! Grateful for anybody who steps up to help!

Why not just attach the file here? Is it too big (forum limit: 128k)?

With many damaged OO files there is no usable data in the file--at least we can tell you that much.

#To follow up on acknak's post: Experts here usually will try to recover the file if possible. No charge.

If the file is too large you might want to look into MediaFire or Dropbox and post the link here---however I don't know how many people actually read this forum regularly. I don't. You would probably be better off posting in the Writer forum.

Some of Rory's advice from here viewtopic.php?f=7&t=80104&p=368662#p368662 may be of some use in recovering some or all of the document.

For others searching.

It is a pity you were editing a .doc file because had you been editing a .odt file, you should have been able to un-delete the temporary files which Writer wrote while you were editing the file and then deleted. Because of the way Microsoft defines .doc files Writer does not create temporary files for .doc files.

See [Tutorial] How to find and un-delete Writer temporary files for instructions on how to identify and un-delete the temporary files Writer wrote while you were editing the file, and then deleted. You should be able to recover your file as it was when you last opened it or as it was when it was last saved with AutoRecovery.

You may also find previous versions of the file in the folder it is located in, but which have since been deleted.

If you had AutoRecovery set to ON, you should be able to recover the now deleted AutoRecovery files even for a .doc file.

See [Tutorial] Differences between Writer and MS Word files for why you should always work in and save files as .odt.