Style Changing to Plain Text

[SClark]

A user created a brand new document from scratch. Saved
many times with many versions. The document was formatted
with different styles. Around the 9th version of the
document whenever the user opened the document everything
was Plain Text Style. If you made changes and saved the
document with the correct styles, the next time you opened
the document it was back to Plain Text Styles throughout
the entire document. I would normally think that the
document was corrupt BUT we have now had 4-5 users
experiencing this same problem and it isn't just with 1
document per person.

Any ideas what may be causing this? Any help would be
greatly appreciated.

Thanks.
S. Clark

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I suspect that the users have "Files of type" (in the File Open dialog) set
to "Recover Text from Any File." See
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/AppErrors/RecoverText.htm

 

[Bob S]

A user created a brand new document from scratch. Saved
many times with many versions. The document was formatted
with different styles. Around the 9th version of the
document whenever the user opened the document everything
was Plain Text Style. If you made changes and saved the
document with the correct styles, the next time you opened
the document it was back to Plain Text Styles throughout
the entire document. I would normally think that the
document was corrupt BUT we have now had 4-5 users
experiencing this same problem and it isn't just with 1
document per person.

If you use Word to open a text file, the entire contents will be
formatted as Plain Text Style. If you save the results of editing a
text file, it will be saved as a text file, even if you have applied
styles and formatting to the contents.

I speculate that someone accidentally saved the document as plain text
at some point. It requires slightly more effort to save it as plain
text but with a DOC extension, but it is quite do-able.

You may want to turn on "Tools | Options | General | Confirm
conversions on open"; if you do you should get a small dialog box when
you open the file. The box will ask if it is OK to convert the file
from plain text to open it.

To fix things, you will have to manually apply styles and formatting,
and then save the file in Word Document format.

Bob S