Doc won't open--ASCII filter?

[magneticanomaly]

l use Open office for documents, and always save them as Word files so that others will be able to open them .

Never had a problem. Wrote a doc a few weeks ago, saved it as usual, go to open it today, and instead of the document coming up right away, I get a box called. "ASCII filter options"

Whatever I do to this box, I eventually click "Okay". and the document comes up as hash-marks (here is a sample:######################################################################################################################################################################################################################)

That ain't my document!

Has OO eaten my document? How do I open my document?
############

[aqualung]

Hello and welcome to the forum!

Chances that you can recover your document are slim to none... and Slim just skipped town.

Have a look at this thread: http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/ ... =6&t=17677

Backup early and often, and in addition save to external media at regular intervals.

[Zizi64]

always save them as Word file

Do not do it!


1. Always save your document into native ODF formats. At end of editing, you can "export" or "save to" into another file formats.
2. Always open to re-edit the ODF files, but not the exported ones.
3. Always make more than one backup saving of your important documents.

This is the safest methode...

Can you upload the problematic file here?
(see: How to attach a document here?)

[magneticanomaly]

Thanks very much for the responses!

I always save documents I create in OO as Word, because most people I need to communicate with use Microsoft Word, and would not be able to open ODF file. That's one of the things I like about OO, I can emulate anybody else's doc file. OO also backs up automatically, at least it acts like it because if i mess up or computer goes down in middle of writing, OO can almost always recover the doc, even if I have been slack about frequent saving.Have done it for years, with thousands of pages of documents, never a problem. I do not want to have to keep two copies of everything, wonder which is the current draft, etc.

I keep my docs on external hard drive, all the other stuff there is fine. Everything else (that I have tried) opens just fine, does not ask me to

I have attached the offending document. What does the "ASCII filter options" box mean?

Thanks for all the help!

[thomasjk]

The AscII filter means that OOo does not recognize the file format. Its all ###################### which is not recoverable. Saving on ODF format first has a better chance of recovery if the file becomes corrupted. Saving as .doc format which is binary guarantees loss if the file becomes corrupted. See Hint: How did I fix my odt File.

[RoryOF]

In addition to what thomasjk has said, ASCII filter options in theory allows one specify what national language selection has been used for a plain text file, so that accented characters show correctly, but in respect of an OpenOffice format file, coupled with the ####s, it means that the file is corrupted. Sometimes (rarely) there may be a hidden backup, or it may be possible (even more rarely) to recover part of the unformatted content.

[aqualung]

To OP: Just out of curiosity, when you saved the file, was there a power cut that crashed your computer? If no power cut, did you click on the "Save" icon and then immediately afterward on the red "X" in the top right corner of Writer to shut it down?

[magneticanomaly]

Thanks for all the consistent advice. Guess I gotta believe y'all.

To Aqualung, it is quite possible that I shut my system down (by shutting off power) immediately after saving that file.

OKay I now have umpty-ump files in OO's version of M-Word. Perhaps I had better now save all henceforward in oDF. Can someone suggest an efficient procedure for sending such files (usually as email attachments) to the majority of the world who have never heard of an ODF file?

[aqualung]

Another user reported that OOo delayed writes to disk, causing problems. I'm not inclined to believe this since it goes against what I know of operating systems and hard disk controllers... but on the other hand I don't know all that much Many of the reports we have heard of documents being turned into a heap of ##'s involve power cuts. Closing Writer immediately upon saving a document may fall into the same category. Developers were informed but they will not look into it until we can present them with a reproducible test case, which is hard to do.

You can suggest to your contacts, in a low-key way, that they give LibreOffice or OpenOffice.org a try. However, most probably will not do this so you will have to rely on .doc files for now. All indications are that OOo/LibO do a good job of saving to .doc. Not perfect, some finicky formatting can get messed up, but good enough most of the time. I would suggest testing how it looks in Microsoft Word before you send out a .doc file saved by OOo. For this purpose, you can download the Microsoft Word viewer, free of charge, from the Microsoft website.

The MultiSave extension will install an extra icon on your toolbar so that you can simultaneously save to .odt and .doc (and PDF if desired), no need to save to .odt first and then save (or convert to) doc afterwards.

[Zizi64]

...or you can try the "Multiformat Backup" function of the WritersTools extension...

http://extensions.services.openoffice.o ... ritertools