[Solved] Text lost, ballooned size, munged characters

[Cyberdog]

Hello. Apologies if this is a known issue. I searched using the best keywords that I could think of, and didn't see anything on this.

I saved a (previously) 11 page, 30KB text-only (no special characters, fonts, pictures or tables), .odt file, but when I opened the file on the same PC on which I created it, the text was completely lost. I first had to select options in a "Properties" dialogue box (I never saw this before on any other files I open) and when I dismissed the box and the file opened, the text was replaced with strange characters and the file size had ballooned to 154KB and gone from 11 pages to 608 pages.

Fortunately I had printed the file to pdf and was able to copy my original 11 pages of words, but if I hadn't done that, it would have been all lost, which is very disconcerting.

None of the other 30 or so .odt files on my HDD seem to have not been affected judging by the normal; file sizes, bit I have not tried opening them all yet. The one or two most recent files I have checked open normally.

Using O.O. 4.1.3 on Windows 10.

Any ideas on recovery of the original text or avoiding this in the future will be much appreciated.

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[Hagar Delest]

The file is clearly a PDF. You may have exported it as PDF and tried to open that file with AOO.

If you go to the AOO recent documents list, are you able to load the correct file?

[Cyberdog]

The file is clearly a PDF. You may have exported it as PDF and tried to open that file with AOO.

If you go to the AOO recent documents list, are you able to load the correct file?

Good catch. I didn't notice the writing up at the top.

No, selecting from the recent list opens up the munged file.

I had fortuitously printed to .pdf (which I don't normally do) and was able copy the text, so I suspect that when I copied the .pdf that I had just printed, I must have unknowingly pasted it into my .odt file and saved it without noticing. I was doing a lot of copy/paste in emails and onto drives that day.

Also, none of the other files seem affected.

I consider this solved.

TYVM!