Text documents opens with odd characters

[caupwhiting13]

These types of characters like these. ‡å##± y™&aÇ#ý‘ù##ú%Ò�#\?v…ñîï3�ßÀ#JÓ#¬¬'ÅQJ|¬£ÏIo‡Ô0¦œóUayaa2#ûaHñSì¡Ú{±=TÞð#kÔf”W�Ê#I#�£–{#ÇÜ�Z´Mƒô


A lot of my documents open this way.


Is there anything I can to correct this issue?



Thank you

[RoryOF]

What are the extensions (the three letters after the . at filename end) of the files in question?

[caupwhiting13]

What are the extensions (the three letters after the . at filename end) of the files in question?

.doc

[RoryOF]

Are you certain they are opening in OpenOffice? Please try one again, and check what the opening application /Help /About says.

Have they been emailed or moved from another computer?

[RoryOF]

Also, if the documents originated on your computer, how did you Save them as .doc? In /File /Save As did you select Word 97/2000/XP from the file type dropdown, or did you merely add a .doc extension?

[caupwhiting13]

Are you certain they are opening in OpenOffice? Please try one again, and check what the opening application /Help /About says.

Have they been emailed or moved from another computer?

Help/about and an open office window pops up.

These files have been moved/backed up from another computer.

[caupwhiting13]

Also, if the documents originated on your computer, how did you Save them as .doc? In /File /Save As did you select Word 97/2000/XP from the file type dropdown, or did you merely add a .doc extension?

I didn't add the .doc extension.
When I try to open files either in word or open office, I only get the odd characters. Are you saying to save those files with Save As and save as word? This laptop has Office 2013 installed on it.

[caupwhiting13]

This is the window that pops up when I try to open the document. I hit enter using the defaults and get the unreadable document.


ASCII Filter Options
Character set Western Europe (Windows-1252WinLatin 1)
Default Fonts Times New Roman
Language English (USA)
Paragraph break CR & LF or CR or LF

[RoryOF]

The ASCII filter message indicates that OO cannot understand the file format. If the file then opens as a series of #### characters, then this shows it has been utterly corrupted. The characters you show suggest that the file being opened might be of an incorrect type, for example, a PDF format file being opened in OO - to possibly decide this, we need to see the first few characters of such an opened document.

However, as the files have been moved from another computer it may be that they have been corrupted in the move; I suggest that the move be redone, with attention paid to the operating system's USB removal protocol.

When working in OO to generate a document, when naming the document using /File /Save As, if a change in the type of document is required this should be done by dropping the file type selector and choosing the target file type - for doc files Word 97/2000/XP is best) - "Automatic file name extension" should also be checked. However this is not relevant to recovery of the current documents.

[Hagar Delest]

Can you upload a sample file so that we check if we can open them (see How to attach a document here)?