 You don't need to be an 'investor' to invest in Singletrack: 6 days left: 95% of target - Find out more
Dr North is usually a dab hand at IT stuff. But an abstract for a paper she's been tearing her hair out over all night on our iMac is now corrupted. Document opens but text now replaced with gibberish symbols. Nothing obvious will fix it.
Help!
Anyone got any very smart tips for recovering the content to help save the girl (and get me some sleep tonight!)?
Cheers
Have you checked to see if Autosave was on?
https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Automatically-save-and-recover-files-6c6425b1-6559-4bbf-8f80-4f038402ff02?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US&fromAR=1
Obvious suggestions I guess includes file auto backups? (Time Machine on Mac I believe ).
Could be a random font or formatting issue; maybe try changing whole document to Arial and stripping out any inserted bits to make it as vanilla* as possible?
*Bang on trend with the office bull bingo phrases 🙂
Autosave - dunno. She's been saving to Dropbox....
Time machine - good call.
I'll go and check!
Well if you had said Dropbox first....
https://www.dropbox.com/help/11
All the old versions are there.
Ok, so lookalike autosave on her login isn't enabled (that will be changed..!). And bcs it's Dropbox and the finder integration is disabled in Yosemite, I can't see an obvious way to use Time Machine to our advantage.
Thanks for the Dropbox tip (I'm not a user, so not familiar with its features). I don't know her login, so will give it a try in the morning when she's awake (no doubt in a cold sweat at 3.30 am when I'll be expected to kick into action...).
Thank you!!!
[url= https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/918429 ]Hopefully some ideas that will help...[/url]
Dropbox versions is best bet. Otherwise try uploading to google docs as that sometimes works. Also try opening word first and then opening or importing the file from there.
Maybe try an online repair?
Something like this?
https://onlinefilerepair.com/en/rtf-repair-online.html
docx files are just zip files.
Copy, rename to .zip and then unzip. You should see the individual components and rebuild the doc from there.
You might be able to open the text component in (whatever the macOS equivalent is of) Notepad and recover the text, if not the formatting and images.
The file corruption issue you mention is a rare but long-acknowledged issue with Mac Word. No fix has been forthcoming from MS and AFAIK there's no way to recover the file.
What do you mean by Finder integration with Dropbox is "disabled"? Since Dropbox works by mirroring a folder on your hard drive, the file must exist on your computer surely? It can't purely be in the cloud? Therefore you should be able to access a previous version with Time Machine?
Hopefully that, or the Dropbox versioning, will work. Otherwise it's a hard lesson in the value of proper backups unfortunately...
I don't know whether you've tried this - [url= https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/kb/893672 ]https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/kb/893672[/url]?
I'm only familiar with Word on PC but would hope that the feature is still there on the Mac version.
It might be worth saving the file out as plain text just to see what comes out.
Hopefully that, or the Dropbox versioning, will work. Otherwise it's a hard lesson in the value of proper backups unfortunately...
Sadly it seems like the hard lesson is true.
What's more frustrating for me - apart from ending up with five hours broken sleep - is that she wouldn't accept this from her masters and PhD students...!!!
I am surprised Dropbox didnt work - always managed to run back to an old version on a PC!
Ha...her and my both - but dont tell our students that 😛What's more frustrating for me - apart from ending up with five hours broken sleep - is that she wouldn't accept this from her masters and PhD students...!!!
Isn't the Dropbox versions just a Pro account feature though?
I have had some success with opening office files on the PC version when the Mac one is corrupted. Also check if there's a temp file in the Dropbox folder with this type of file name (4D196000). Right click and select open with Word.
Word is just too unreliable... unless you make backups as you go, e.g. daily, hourly
I was recommended [url= https://www.latex-project.org/ ]LaTex[/url] during my academic studies.
I think she wrote her PhD thesis using latex about a million years ago - I suspect Remi ding her if that may not be such a great idea.
I'll get her to have a look at the other suggestions when she's finished meeting some important Japanese funding partners.
Does she care about the document itself or just the contents of the document?
If its just the text/images in it and its a XXXX.docx (the 'X' is the important bit) then as suggested above you can actually just rename it from "mydoc.docx" to "mydoc.zip" and open it like a zip file.
You shouldbe able to find the images in there and also the text in word/document.xml. It may take a bit of effort to clean out the XML tags from the text in there but it should all be there.