I am in a complete panic! I have been using Open Office for several years and have never once had an issue. However, this evening changed that! I went to open a word document that contained something very lengthy that I have been working long and hard on. Upon opening it, I was completely shocked to see that instead of the regular font I had always been using, the entire thing was made up of little hash tags/pound symbols: "#################". I figured somehow it had just gotten switched to a strange font, so I went and tried to change it. To my horror, this was not the issue. Changing the font simply changed what the hash tags looked like. I closed out and tried to open it back again. This time, a small screen popped up called "ASCII Filter Options". It had a list of Properties to choose from: Character Set, Default Fonts, Language, and Paragraph Break. I can not make heads or tails of any of it. The Default Font is set at "Times New Roman" and the Language is set at "English" so I'm guessing the issue must be the Character Set. I scrolled through to see a list of many options. This is what the beginning of the list looks like:
Arabic (DOS/OS2-864)
Arabic (ISO-8859-6)
Arabic (Windows-1256)
Baltic (DOS/OS2-775)
Baltic (ISO-8859-4)
Baltic (Windows-1257)
It goes on and on with options like Chinese (simplified and traditional), Cyrillic, Eastern Europe, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Thai, Turkish, Unicode, and Western Europe.
What is really making me panic is the fact that I scrolled through each and every single option and tried opening it with all of them and nothing changed. And what is even more frustrating is the fact that every other word document is opening completely normally and totally fine. This is the ONLY one!Does anyone have ANY idea what's going on here or how to solve this?? As I said, this is a very important document that would absolutely devastate me to lose. Please help if you can!!!!!!!!!