Backed up Word documents open with little squares

Hi

I backed up all my files on a CD and now when I open them in WinXP, I get
little squares everywhere -nothing else. All of my back-up is like this.
Most docs were created in Office 2000 but I now have Office 2002. Could this
be a problem?

Thanks

Brenda

I backed up all my files on a CD and now when I open them in WinXP,
I get little squares everywhere -nothing else. All of my back-up is like this.
Most docs were created in Office 2000 but I now have Office 2002.
Could this be a problem?


Hi Brenda,

Word 97 to 2003 share the same file format, so that shouldn't be an issue.

I'm afraid something went wrong with your backup :-(

If you see only boxes or squares, and nothing else at all, chances are slim that the file still contains useful stuff. Corrupted files often contain lots of ASCII zeros and little if anything else. If you use "Edit Find" and type ^0 in "Find what", does that find all those squares? Then there isn't anything at all in that file.

One slim chance is that Word changed all codes to those that are usually used for symbol fonts. Since regular fonts don't have any characters with those codes, they all display as squares. If that should be the problem, the macro from http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=212396 might restore the codes and fix the text.

Good luck,
Klaus