Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

So any help with this would be greatly appreciated, I'm a little panicked - I've been using this file for a couple of weeks now to take notes in one of my classes. It's a .doc file, and I've had no problem with it until today when I got to class. When I tried to open it, Oo gave me this ASCII filter options window with:

Character Set: Western Europe Windows-1252/WinLatin 1
Default Fonts: Times New Roman
Language: English (USA)
Paragraph Break: CR

Then when I select ok, suddenly my file is 183 pages of gibberish. How on earth do I restore this? I have a dual boot system with Windows 7 & Ubuntu 9.10. I get the same thing in Linux, though the actual settings on the ASCII filter options window is different. I did a virus and spyware scan and nothing came up, so I can't figure out how this file could have gotten corrupted. Just please tell me if there's any way to fix it because I'm not looking forward to having to somehow recompile those notes.... thanks in advance!

Read this (especially the post titled Profile Content), which describes where you may find a backup version of your file: [Tutorial] The OOo user profile.

If a file is important to you, get into the habit of making your own backups of it. Save it frequently and under difference names and in different folders. It's the only way to be safe, regardless of what office suite you use.

Were you working direct to a USB stick?

So there's no way to recover the file then? I checked in both the windows and linux backup folders, and both were empty, apparently because I didn't have that setting activated (which I will now immediately go rectify!). Normally I'm very good about keeping my files regularly backed up, but it's been a bit crazy the last couple of weeks so I haven't backed up the system in a while. I may have a incomplete copy of it on my external harddrive, though, which is better than nothing, I guess. And, no, I wasn't working directly from a USB drive.

It's a .doc file, ...

A separate backup copy is the real answer, but beyond that, it's a lot safer to save your work in OOo's native ODF format, and only export other formats as temporary copies as needed.

Also, were you working under Windows or Linux when this happened?

Duly noted. Though I have been using Oo for years and I've never had this problem before. Incidentally, I was working in linux at the time, and unfortunately hadn't backed up my system in a while.