Prompted to select encoding when opening a document in Word 2007

[Gary]

I work the Help Desk at a university and have a student in dire need of
assistance. Here is the information that I have:

She started a document in Word 2003. The document was saved and the user
emailed it to herself. She then edited it in Word 2007 and saved it. The
user next opened the file in Word 2003 and worked on it for a very lengthy
time. Per the user, she was saving changes every ten minutes. The user then
closed the document at the end of this editing session and attempted to
reopen it. At this point the user was prompted to select the encoding that
makes the document readable. She said she downloaded and installed Word 2007
and is still getting the same message.

It may be worth noting that the original file name was Paper-Wednesday. The
user now has another file on her Desktop called ~$per-Wednesday. Per the
user, the ~$per-Wednesday file has the newest changes that were made. The
Paper-Wednesday file has the document prior to those changes. When
attempting to open the ~$per-Wednesday file is when the user gets the message
about selecting encoding to use.

I'd like to know if there is any way to fix this problem without her having
to go back and basically recreate the changes she made. Thank you. A prompt
response would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Jay Freedman]

The impression that the ~$per-Wednesday file contains the changes is
incorrect. That file is the "owner file" that tells Word whether the
Paper-Wednesday file is in use. It's described at
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=211632 in the section "Owner File (Same
Directory as Source File)".

If the user opened the attachment directly from the email without first
saving it as a separate disk file, the changes *may* be in a temporary file
or may have been permanently lost. See
http://www.gmayor.com/outlook_attachments.htm for instructions to try to
recover the temporary file if it still exists.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP
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