Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

Today when I opened up a short story I've been working on the text had converted from standard English to # gibberish. How do I get it back to normal? Why would it do this??

Previous experience tells that your file will be utterly corrupt. Try the methods in this post, as soon as possible, in the hope of recovering part or all of it.

The damage is possibly due to over-hasty power-off of computer or closure of laptop lid, before the file housekeeping has been written to disk.

As soon as possible try the methods in this tutorial
See [Tutorial] How to find and un-delete AOO temporary files for detailed instructions on how to

a) use Previous Versions (W7 and later) to recover previous versions of the file (is there something similar on MacOS and Linux?);

b) recover your file as it was when you last opened or saved it, or as it was when it was last saved with AutoRecovery;

c) find previous versions of the file in the folder it is located in, but which have since been deleted;

d) un-delete the temporary files AOO wrote while you were editing the file, and then deleted. This will recover your file as it was when you last opened or you last saved it.

There will be nothing usable in your damaged file - waste no time with it. Try the recovery methods above.

Thanks. I'll try to make sense of all this!

I managed to locate three old versions of my story but none will open without choosing ASCII Filter Options: Character set, default font, language, paragraph break. What do I set my character set and paragraph break to? (I don't want to make a wrong choice.) Thanks in advance . . .

Either all these old versions are damaged, or your OpenOffice is damaged. Start by assuming your OpenOffice is damaged - that usually means the OpenOffice User Profile is corrupt. Delete the OO User Profile; it will make a new one when you next start OpenOffice.

Details of the OO User profile are given in
[Tutorial] The OpenOffice User Profile

Thanks.