help! My text is gone and turned into lines of boxes!!

[harmony]

I am writing a book and saved my file on my pen drive. When I opened it up
this morning all my text was gone and had turned into lines of boxes!! I have
no idea what happened, but would like to know how to fix it. Can anyone help?

 

[Benjamin Barrett]

Is the font different? See whether changing the font fixes the problem.

Also, check any backups you have or that Word created.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Or see "WD2002: Symbol Characters Are Changed to Box Characters" at
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=290978.

If that's not the issue, then the doc has probably been corrupted by being
saved directly to a removable drive.

 

[ale]

If your file is corrupted and you cannot recover the information in Word, try
opening the file in Notebook or some other text editor. Although the
formatting may be gone and you will have a lot of extra characters, you may
see enough of your book to copy and paste into Word to help you remember what
you wrote as you try to rebuild it.

As your book gets bigger, you may want to copy the file to a removable
medium (disk, CD, etc). Do not do a Save As, instead do a Copy from Windows
Explorer.

 

[harmony]

This is so frustrating, nothing seems to be working. I tried opening it in
wordpad and it didn't work. I tried changing the font and that didn't work.
I tried changing the macros and that didn't work,but I am not sure if I even
did that correctly.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

If "Recover Text from Any File" won't help, then it's pretty much lost. In
future, do not save directly to any removable device; always save to the HD,
then copy to the device.

 

[harmony]

I tried as an experiment saving a word doc on my computer than transferring
it to the pen drive and it too shows up as boxes. So nothing is saving
correctly. I don't understand why it is doing this.

How do I "recover text from any file" exactly??