Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

I have been working on a paper for 2 days and saved it some hours ago. When I tried to open it now, I am being asked which ASCI filters to use. I have no idea of what that means, so I tried different options, but no matter what I do, the paper looks like this:

###################################################################################################################################################
###################################################################################################################################################
###################################################################################################################################################
###################################################################################################################################################
###################################################################################################################################################
###################################################################################################################################################

and so on.

Does that mean that I have wasted two days work?

Unfortunately yes. The file is corrupt beyond repair. See viewtopic.php?f=6&t=17677. There is work gong on to identify the cause such problems viewtopic.php?f=6&t=17677&p=298136&hili ... er#p298136. You may want to look in the user profile viewtopic.php?f=74&t=12426 for a backup copy named filename.bak.

Check the temporary folder of the system (see in OOo Tools>Options>OOo>Paths). If there are folders like sgmlf.tmp with a file having the same name inside, make a copy of that file, rename it in .odt and cross your fingers. If you have not rebooted, you might have those files still there.

If nothing to recover and no backup, then, yes, you've wasted 2 days. Sorry.
Any power shortage or were you working on a USB key?
What OS? You should add it in your signature (see How to update your software information signature).

Still using OOo 3.1? It's rather deprecated now.

I have had enough of this OpenOffice crap. I decided to skip Microsoft and support OO instead, also financially, but I have experienced so MUCH PISS and noone is interested, so I dont want to waste more time on this SHIT. In the good old days a number of engaged amateurs, including myself, made a lot of excellent software, driven by proudness - this is definitely not the case here, on the contraty: The more you use OO, the more you realize that it is even worse than Microsoft.

Of course you have a backup copy somewhere, like all good PC users have .

It is now 2016, and I have had the same problem that I see people having since 2011. I followed the advice about temporary files, but no luck. I lost many days of work. Is there no progress?

The problem arises for the most part because of over-hasty close down of the computer, before the internal housekeeping is finished. For a safer closedown it is merely a matter of going through the correct closedown procedure for the operating system and waiting until all disk activity is finished, perhaps ten seconds longer than one has been doing.

donfromconn wrote:It is now 2016, and I have had the same problem that I see people having since 2011. I followed the advice about temporary files, but no luck. I lost many days of work. Is there no progress?

Are you still using AOO 3.4.1? Even if there were progress, you'd never see it using that obsolete version.

See Using Recuva to un-delete Writer temporary files for help recovering the temporary files which Writer wrote while you were editing the .odt file, and then deleted when Writer was closed.

Search for files named something like TEMP_PATH\sv1kposb.tmp\sv1kv4ak.tmp, where TEMP_PATH is the Temporary files path set up in Tools > Options > OpenOffice > Paths; and \sv1kposb.tmp\ is a folder. Rename files with names like sv1kv4ak.tmp to sv1kv4ak.odt and try to open them. If what you were editing had images in it, some of the .tmp files will be images.

OOo 3.4.1 is completely obsolete. You can download the latest version of AOO 4.1.2 from http://www.openoffice.org/

Thanks so much! I will be careful.